Many disabled individuals adamantly oppose medical assistance in dying, quite rightly referencing pervasive ableism and, euthanasia’s dark history in the Aktion T4 program of Nazi Germany in which...

Wealthy individuals have many adventures to choose from in today’s world, including visiting the moon and spending time in the deepest canyons of the ocean. But the most coveted waiting list is spo...

In 1997, when Oregon became the first U.S. jurisdiction authorizing medical aid in dying (MAID), its law included a requirement that patients be legal residents of the state. Other U.S. jurisdictions legalizing MAID followed Oregon in adopting residency requirements. Recent litigation challenges the legality, as well as the justification, for such requirements. Facing such challenges, Oregon and Vermont eliminated their MAID residency requirements. More states could follow this move, for, in certain circumstances, the U.S. Constitution's privileges and immunities clause protects (...) citizens' right to travel to secure medical care. Policy considerations could also motivate states to reexamine whether such requirements are justified in light of existing evidence of how MAID laws have been applied. (shrink)

By titling his paper “Slowing the Slide Down the Slippery Slope of Medical Assistance in Dying: Mutual Learnings for Canada and the US,” Daryl Pullman, an esteemed medical ethicist, uses a rhetoric...

Pullman (2023) compares medically-assisted dying (MAiD) laws and rates of medically-assisted deaths in Canada and California, noting some differences in the legal regime and a higher rate of MAiD i...

In this commentary, we criticize the argument that allowing euthanasia for people with disabilities is ableist. We analyze the distinction between facts and values in medical assistance in dying, the expressivist objection, and the problem of crypwashing.

Daryl Pullman’s (2023) article in this issue of the American Journal of Bioethics thoughtfully compares influencing factors in the uptake of assisted suicide and euthanasia practices in Canada and...

Pullman argues that when it comes to medical aid in dying (MAID), “Canada … has much to learn from California” (Pullman 2023). Canada and California have similar populations: each about 40 million...

Daryl Pullman (2023) highlights a striking statistic—while aid in dying constitutes less than one percent of deaths in the U.S. states that have legalized the practice,1 around three percent of dea...

Undeniably, a strikingly higher number of people die with direct health care provider involvement in Canada’s euthanasia regime, euphemistically termed “Medical Assistance in Dying” [MAiD], than un...

Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) regime is starting to be publicly called into question. Scholars such as Daryl Pullman (2023), for example, have questioned the moral grounds that justif...

Pullman (2023) raises some reasonable worries about the use of MAiD in Canada and outlines a plausible proposal to require patients who request MAiD but who do not meet the “reasonably foreseeable...

By the time this essay is published, it will be a matter of weeks before doctors and nurse practitioners in Canada can legally end the lives (by medical assistance in dying, or MAID) of non-dying p...

In his target article, Daryl Pullman explores and explains the divergent developments of the frequency of medical assistance in dying (MAID) in Canada and California in the US (Pullman 2023). One o...

Abstract‘Assisted dying’ (an umbrella term for euthanasia and/or assisted suicide) is frequently defended as an act of autonomous self-determination in death but, given a choice, between 93.3% and 100% of patients are reluctant to self-administer (median 99.5%). If required to self-administer, fewer patients request assisted death and, of these, a sizable proportion do not self-administer but die of natural causes. This manifest avoidance runs counter to the concept of autonomous self-determination, even on the supposition that suicide could truly be autonomous. (...) The avoidance of self-administration does not show that self-administration, when it occurs, is necessarily autonomous. It suggests, rather, that there are other frames by which assisted dying is being understood. One such is desire for medical control, a desire shared by patients and doctors. Such a frame is not directed towards an exacting autonomy (self-directed action by the patient) but towards a comforting heteronomy (letting the doctor take control). (shrink)

The recent push to extend physician-aid-in-dying (PAD) to psychiatric conditions has significantly altered the ethical landscape surrounding psychiatric judgments concerning treatment-refractory il...

Daryl Pullman provides a valuable comparison between the Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) rates in Canada and California, illuminating the factors that appear to be pushing Canada down a slippery...

Daryl Pullman’s (2023) article purports to show that the increase and relatively high number of assisted deaths in Canada argues against the Canadian approach to medical aid in dying (MAiD)—similar...

In “Slowing the slide down the slippery slope of Medical Assistance in Dying: Mutual Learnings for Canada and the US,” Daryl Pullman (2023) gets a variety of empirical, logical and legal things wro...