Objectives: To discover what factors affect lay people’s judgments of the acceptability of physician assisted suicide and euthanasia and how these factors interact.Design: Participants rated the acceptability of either physician assisted suicide or euthanasia for 72 patient vignettes with a five factor design—that is, all combinations of patient’s age ; curability of illness ; degree of suffering ; patient’s mental status , and extent of patient’s requests for the procedure .Participants: Convenience sample of 66 young adults, 62 middle aged adults, (...) and 66 older adults living in western France.Main measurements: In accordance with the functional theory of cognition of N H Anderson, main effects, and interactions among patient factors and participants’ characteristics were investigated by means of both graphs and ANOVA.Results: Patient requests were the most potent determinant of acceptability. Euthanasia was generally less acceptable than physician assisted suicide, but this difference disappeared when requests were repetitive. As their own age increased, participants placed more weight on patient age as a criterion of acceptability.Conclusions: People’s judgments concur with legislation to require a repetition of patients’ requests for a life ending act. Younger people, who frequently are decision makers for elderly relatives, place less emphasis on patient’s age itself than do older people. (shrink)

Objectives: To clarify how lay people and health professionals judge the acceptability of ending the life of a terminally ill patient.Design: Participants judged this acceptability in a set of 16 scenarios that combined four factors: the identity of the actor , the patient’s statement or not of a desire to have his life ended, the nature of the action as relatively active or passive , and the type of suffering .Participants: 115 lay people and 72 health professionals in Toulouse, France.Main (...) measurements: Mean acceptability ratings for each scenario for each group.Results: Life ending interventions are more acceptable to lay people than to the health professionals. For both, acceptability is highest for intractable physical suffering; is higher when patients end their own lives than when physicians do so; and, when physicians are the actors, is higher when patients have expressed a desire to die than when they have not . In contrast, when patients perform the action, acceptability for the lay people and nurse’s aides does not depend on whether the patient has expressed a desire to die, while for the nurses and physicians unassisted suicide is more acceptable than physician assisted suicide.Conclusions: Lay participants judge the acceptability of life ending actions in largely the same way as do healthcare professionals. (shrink)