Legal Alternatives to Assisted Suicide Examined

Monday, December 4, 2006

KPBS Public Broadcasting

Audio

Aired 4/19/09

Tom Fudge : Confronting death is the greatest challenge we face in life. And death has, if anything, become more complicated by the miracles of medicine that extend our lives today. Now, doctors and families have to decide whether to keep patients on life support. Patients and their families have to decide whether to use feeding tubes. And we all have to face the question of how much value life has when it involves acute pain and the loss of physical and mental function.

Most people who anticipate these decisions say they want to have the option to end their lives when they choose. To many people that means having access to so-called physician assisted suicide. But Dr. Stanley Terman has written a book that discusses a legal option that all of us have. The option is voluntary refusal of food and fluid.

Guest
  • Stanley Terman , MD, PhD., psychiatrist and founder and executive director of Caring Advocates, a non-profit organization and author of The Best Way to say Goodbye: A Legal Peaceful Choice at the End of Life.

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