Thomas S. Szasz, M.D. (1920 - 2012) Fatal Freedom: The Ethics and Politics of Suicide (2000)
Language and Suicide
Prescribing Suicide: Death as Treatment
Kevorkian on Suicide
...As the number of suicides acknowledged to have occurred in Kevorkian's "presence" increased, the press lost interest in him. In June 1998, in an evident bid for fresh publicity, Kevorkian enacted the dream he had announced in Medicide, "the culling of medical benefit . . . from rationally planned death." After helping a 45-year-old quadriplegic man to die, unnamed person or persons removed the man's kidneys, and Kevorkian offered them to any transplantation team that wanted them. None did.
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Dr. Timothy E. Quill: The Doctor with the "Silky Manners"
The Mask of Responsibility
...We should beware of Quill's cant about "assuming responsibility" for his patients, a phrase superiors typically use to conceal their desire to control their subordinates. Masters were responsible for their slaves. Parents are responsible for their minor children. Accused of authorizing the circumcision of his daughter, a Somali father in Houston, Texas, explained: “It s my responsibility. If I don't do it, I will have failed my children.”
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PAS and VE: Professionals, the Press, and the Public
...The writer's selective indignation is a poor substitute for reasoning. He considers denying drugs to dying patients who want to kill themselves as a violation of their personal autonomy, but he evidently does not consider denying drugs to responsible, hard-working citizens a violation of their personal autonomy. He considers killing oneself under conditions approved by physicians and with their assistance a constitutional right, but he evidently considers killing oneself when one wants to without physician assistance a mental illness and violation of the mental health laws. This mantra has replaced meaningful dialogue.
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Faye Girsh, executive director of the Hemlock Society USA, emphasizes: "What we have been advocating for 17 years is legal aid in dying with the help of a physician." She proposes that "In the case of a minor or an incompetent adult... some provision should be made [to terminate lives that] in the belief of the patient or his agent are too burdensome to continue."
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Anticipating the Supreme Court's decision in the case of Compassion in Dying v. State of Washington, a panel of prominent philosophers-including Thomas Nagel, Robert Nozick, John Rawls, Thomas Scanlon, Judith Jarvis Thomson, and headed by Ronald Dworkin, professor of jurisprudence at Oxford University and professor of law and philosophy at New York University-issued an appeal supporting the right to such assistance. <...> The philosophers emphasize their opposition to "forcing a competent dying patient to live in agony a few weeks longer," and say they are unable to discern significant differences between refusing treatment and receiving PAS, and praise PAS as a boon especially for poor people: "The most important benefit of legalized assisted suicide for poor patients however, might be better care while they live." While this sounds uplifting,
evidence from the Netherlands suggests that PAS and VE function, in fact, as substitutes for medical care for the terminally ill, not as incentives for improving such care. Brian Eads, a writer for Reader's Digest, reports: "In Holland, the key alternative to euthanasia-palliative care-is largely unavailable."