Issues Regarding Euthanasia and Assisted Suicides
Issues Regarding Euthanasia and Assisted Suicides
The issue of whether or not to legalize physician-assisted suicide has been front and center as a public policy issue around the world. Many proponents and opponents are largely operating on assumptions as to why people participate in physician-assisted suicide with only a limited amount of support for their attitudes. Not only do those that support physician-assisted suicide often assume that people participate in it for primarily rational and medical reasons from usually physical illnesses. Opponents of physician-assisted suicide often assume that the participants are motivated primarily by typical suicidal behavior, and push for suicide prevention intervention. Clearly one's outlook toward this topic depends a great deal on the lenses through which one views it.
The present essay has two purposes. First, we will summarize some of the data emerging from the PAS sample we have been studying in Michigan. These data are striking in a number of important ways and are important in themselves in an attempt to characterize motivations of people who seek PAS. These data have been presented in detail in several recent articles published both by our research team (Kaplan, Lachenmeier et. al., 2000; Kaplan, O'Dell et. al., 2000) and others (Canetto and Hollenshead, 2000). Here we summarize these data around gender in a particular way to meet the second purpose of our paper: to place these particular data set in a more general model of PAS world-wide, focusing on differences in gender-ratios across these samples. This model will introduce the conception of the degree of physician control as an ordering principle and will examine its relationship to the gender ratio of the PAS participants. In other words, degree of physician control will be treated as an independent variable, ranging across various data sets from unassisted suicide (no doctor involvement) on the one-hand to full euthanasia (full doctor control) on the other. The proportion of women versus men participating in hastened death will be treated as a dependent variable.
Generally, researchers agree that the relationship between physical illness and psychiatric symptamotology is complicated (Fawcett, 1972; Murphy, 1977; Conwell et. al., 1990). The present research report presents data to determine the relative roles of psychosocial versus biomedical factors in the PAS cases in Michigan performed by Dr. Kevorkian and his team. Specifically, we focus on the question of gender differences in this regard.
Sample. The Michigan data derives...