Affirming the Decisions Adolescents Make about Life and Death

Adolescents who are critically, chronically, and terminally ill traditionally have been given little voice in their health care treatment. But over the last three decades attitudes have begun to shift. The legal and medical professions as well as parents and children's advocates have started to recognize that cognitively normal adolescents have decisionmaking capacity and believe these patients ought to have the opportunity to participate in even the toughest of health treatment decisions. Advance directives, if used with sensitivity and care, could prove a valuable means of giving these older pediatric patients a say in their care.     

Caring for Premature Life and Death: The Relational Dynamics of Detachment in a NICU

Drawing on fieldwork in a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) in Chiang Mai during 2010 and 2012, I examine neonatal care as a contingent entanglement of technological and ethical relationships with vulnerable others. Along the continuum of universal antenatal and delivery care, neonatal medicine becomes a normative part of reproductive health care in Chiang Mai. As the NICU opens its door to sick newborns whose belonging to kinship and the nation-state is uncertain, neonatal care requires deliberate practices to incorporate them into life-sustaining connections. By tracing medical staff’s effort to be accountable to their fragile patients, I show that withdrawing of intensive care is relational work that requires affective involvement and distancing through commensality, prosthetic extensions, and karmic network. This specific mode of care, which is premised on the combination of unconditional openness and careful detachment, offers insight into a possible enactment of hospitality within biomedical institutions.     

A French Lawyer's View on Life & Death

The following excerpt from a book recently published in France raises some controversial issues in the medical ethics debate described above by Clarence Blomquist. The author, Francois Sarda, is a prominent Parisian lawyer.     

The Constitution and Hastening Inevitable Death

The due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment protects the right of terminally ill persons to hasten their inevitable death. In prohibiting physicians from prescribing lethal medications by which such patients might hasten death, Michigan's ban on “assisted suicide” unconstitutionally imposes an “undue burden” on the exercise of that right.     

The California Humane and Dignified Death Initiative

The failure of the California Humane and Dignified Death Initiative to receive enough signatures to place it on the November 1988 ballot is analyzed in relation to the California referendum process, provisions of the initiative, and public opinion polls on euthanasia. Assumptions that the California electorate strongly supported the initiative to legalize the provision by doctors of active euthanasia services were the product of wishful thinking and poor polls; the extent to which the referendum's failure involves deep-seated reservations about euthanasia cannot be specified, but must be suspected as a more powerful cause than poor organization.     

The Impending Collapse of the Whole-Brain Definition of Death

No one really believes that literally all functions of the entire brain must be lost for an individual to be dead. A better definition of death involves a higher brain orientation.