| Description |
Largely in response to contemporary medicine's advancing technological capacities to extend the process of dying to extraordinary lengths, recent years have seen the emergence of numerous advocacy groups concerned with what is often called "death with dignity." For instance, the New York-based group, Concern for Dying, distributes the Living Will as a means for individuals to secure their right to refuse unwanted, life-prolonging medical treatment. Another New York group, the Society for the Right to Die, lobbies for passage of "natural death" legislation, and has seen passage of Natural Death Acts in California and ten other U.S. states, and legislative consideration of similar bills in another twenty-seven. The Los Angeles-area group, Hemlock, led by a British writer who helped his cancer-striken wife drink a lethal potion, argues for societal recognition of assisted suicide as an option in terminal illness. Britain's Voluntary Euthanasia Society, once renamed EXIT: The Society for the Right to Die with Dignity, has published and distributed to its members a booklet of suicide methods for use by terminally ill persons; a similar book has become commercially available in France. Nor are such groups a local phenomenon; they are emerging world-wide. Although their views range from quite conservative insistence on passive refusal of treatment to radical suicide-advocacy, there are new voluntary euthanasia societies in Australia, Norway, Sweden, Japan, Denmark, New Zealand, South Africa, Holland, Germany, France, Colombia, Zimbabwe, Canada, India, and Switzerland. |
