The growing traffic in "death tourism" is an indictment of a health-care system that seems to incentivize everything except the peaceful death to which we all aspire. But I'm not sure the solution is to invite Dignitas to open a clinic down the street from every hospital. Advances in palliative care mean that those last years of life do not have to be a moral, medical and financial nightmare.
In the News
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August 3rd, 2009
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August 3rd, 2009
New guidelines on assisted suicide will apply to people who help their loved ones die in Britain as well as to those who help them die abroad, the Director of Public Prosecutions has disclosed.
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August 3rd, 2009
Death is often messy. The same is now true of aspects of the law relating to death. To assist in a suicide ? including one in which death would take place abroad ? is a criminal offence punishable by up to 14 years in prison. Yet those who have had dealings with Dignitas in Switzerland have not been prosecuted.
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August 3rd, 2009
As the right to die is conceded to someone eagerly desiring it, a death sentence is quietly pronounced on someone else clinging to life.
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August 3rd, 2009
Teenagers are to receive 'bribes' of music vouchers to take a test for chlamydia under a controversial new scheme to fight rising infections.
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August 3rd, 2009
President Obama on Thursday issued a directive to federal agencies to begin following new NIH guidelines on federally funded embryonic stem cell research.
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August 3rd, 2009
Expectant Chinese parents are for the first time more likely to hope their offspring will be a daughter rather than a son, turning their backs on decades of tradition.
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August 3rd, 2009
Stem cell tourism ? patients paying for treatment at illegal 'guerrilla' clinics ? continues to be a lucrative racket. Police in Hungary last week arrested four individuals they suspect of running an illegal stem cell treatment clinic in Budapest.
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August 3rd, 2009
Holding the line is a key element of any military defence strategy. If the line is breached, the enemy can pour through. So it is with the defence of civilised values. Both the law of the land and informal networks of social stigma or disapproval play a crucial role in holding the line for the values of a society.
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August 2nd, 2009
The Law Lords have set Britain on a slippery slope. Their decision to instruct the Director of Public Prosecutions to prepare new policy outlining when prosecutions would and would not take place in cases of assisted suicide is an important one.