Background and Objectives: Euthanasia is one of the major challenges in philosophical, medical, ethical, legal, and religious circles that has fueled many debates. The aim of this study was to investigate prediction of students' attitudes toward euthanasia using their religious orientation, self-esteem, and death anxiety. Methods: The samples of this descriptive-correlational study were 247 st...

The response to our position paper on palliative care and euthanasia ¡/ 55 commentaries, from 32 countries, in the March 2003 issue of Palliative Medicine ¡/ has been remarkable in its breadth and variety. Moreover, a most welcome s̀ide effect’, as it were, is that many commentators also take the opportunity to provide important information about the development and recent state of palliative ca...

Abroad, but also in The Netherlands, there are many misunderstandings concerning end of life decisions and euthanasia. In general, euthanasia does not play any role in the intensive care units, simply because it does not fulfill the conditions to carry it out. However, there is still confusion, merely due to the assumption that the Dutch situation is different because of their legislation on eu...

This review is about the discussion that followed my presentation at the UNESCO Bioethics Forum, Manipal. To contextualise, I begin with a brief account of the legal status of euthanasia in India, and then summarize the main argument of my presentation if the moral objective of euthanasia is to end a patient's suffering by ending his or her life in the best possible way, then the form of euthan...

PURPOSE Mice are commonly used in biomedical research, and euthanasia is an important part of mouse husbandry. Approved, humane methods of euthanasia are designed to minimize the potential for pain or discomfort, but may also influence the measurement of experimental variables. METHODS We compared the effects of two approved methods of mouse euthanasia on the levels of retinal dopamine. We ex...

In discussions about the legalisation of active, voluntary euthanasia it is sometimes claimed that what should happen in a liberal society is that the two sides in the debate "agree to disagree". This paper explores what is entailed by agreeing to disagree and shows that this is considerably more complicated than what is usually believed to be the case. Agreeing to disagree is philosophically p...

Euthanasia, as with other forms of medical involvement in the end(ing) of life, has long attracted the attention of health professionals, ethicists, lawyers and of course society more generally. So familiar are the main arguments that, as long ago as 1958, a prominent British lawyer referred to the debates as j̀aded’. In recent years, however, the debates have not only rehearsed established posi...