p. 31

Because patients have the right to information regarding treatment options, nurses in Oregon may give a patient information about obtaining a prescription if he or she requests it. Nurses should not initiate the discussion, however, because the patient may feel pressured to pursue this option

suffering persons, while on the other hand

it eliminates them. This is a profound in-

ternal contradiction; the ethical priority

is to respect the fundamental intrinsic

worth of the person as a whole.

cannot be a medical procedure.key elements in any medical intervention

such as informed consent are simply not

possible without knowing what stands on

the other side of death. Rather than a stan-

dard medical discussion of alternatives based

on scientific data or clinical experience, the

discussion must leave the clinical domain

and enter the domain of speculation. This

is not an exercise in informed-consent.

relationships within families, the pres-

ence of depression, and problems of abuse

and physician error in an already stressed

medical system, make muddy waters even

more turbulent

The Slippery Slope: The Dutch Example

avoiding those twin traps of overtreatment and therapeutic nihilism.

I

If the Hippocratic oath considers the life of the patient as having value and abhors euthanasia, why is euthanasia a good option? If it avoids overtreamtment, is skipping to euthanasia when therapy and other parameters exist not in violation?

sick human being, whose illness may affect the person's family and

economic stability

The patient is a person not their sickness, so the Hippocratic oath should not be violated

How do we know the people requesting these treatments are in their right mind?

from Ernst Haeckel, a leading Darwinian biologist.

He worried that modem medicine

and humanitarianism would allow the weak and sick to survive to reproduce,

thus subverting humanity’s evolutionary progress. To prevent such an outcome,

he suggested various eugenics proposals,

decisions on who should be killed should be left to the physicians, not the

patients.

of the most influential bioethicists promoting involuntary euthanasia for

people with disabilities, argues that science, especially Darwinian science,

shows us that human life has no ultimate purpose, so we should “unsanctify

human life” and permit euthanasia, both voluntary and involuntary.

The autonomy argument falls flat because it can be used for non-terminally I'll people who according to proponets of euthanasia should be able to request the procedure.

The results of the second study suggested that the order effect was caused by participants trying to use the wrongness scale consistently for evaluation of both scenarios.

IF fatigue was 3-6 or 4-6, PAIN SCENARIO WAS 2-3 on wrongness fatigue was 3-4, pain was 1-2 or 1-3

. It is therefore possible that we could have found the order effect predicted by the attitudinal slippery slope argument if we had used scenarios where justifiability of euthanasia differed less

However, it is still important to see the ways that people react to different scenarios as a starting point

If slavery is not justified by autonomy because it "abates the right to a good life," why is death by physician-assisted suicide considered a good exercise of autonomy