Physician involvement in life-ending practices.

Physician-assisted suicide' and euthanasia are acts that explicitly and overtly involve physicians in determining the mode and time of their patients' deaths. Understandably, therefore, these aid-in-dying acts raise concern and apprehension among physicians who would be involved. Although our means of dealing with these practices through our legal system affect all of society, the attitudes of physicians, as designated executors of these acts, are central to ultimate social policy. The public debate over physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia is by no means limited to or even directed by physicians, but I shall restrict the analysis in this Article to examining physicians' practices and attitudes on the subject. Historically and currently, physicians publicly oppose policies in which they are seen as agents of dying, yet they are deeply involved as agents of dying in ways that do not appear to associate them with the acts or to violate the dictum of "do not kill."