Hastening Death by Voluntarily Stopping Eating and Drinking: Clinical, Legal, Ethical, Religious, and Family Perspectives
Check out the proceedings from this world class, two-day conference on VSED. The conference was hosted by Seattle University School of Law on October 14 and 15, 2016.
Through keynote addresses and panel discussions by clinicians, lawyers, ethicists, religious leaders, institutional administrators, and experienced family members, participants engaged in a wide range of challenging medical, legal, ethical, and caregiving issues about VSED:
Clinical findings: comfort and distress, duration, palliative supplements
Who uses VSED, for what reasons, in what circumstances
Narrative cases and family experiences
Legal questions: common law standing, statutory and regulatory inhibitions, permissible involvement of caregivers
Ethical questions: status of VSED re ‘suicide'; comparison with physician aid-in-dying and refusal of medically delivered nutrition & hydration; assistance from proxy decision makers
Religious and cultural perspectives
Dementia care: decision capacity, role of proxies, VSED by advance directive
Hospice and palliative care: normative-cultural compatibility, use in non-terminal situations
Institutional contexts: nursing home practice, abuse regulations, pre-admission understandings
Voluntarily Stopping Eating and Drinking, 6(2) NARRATIVE INQUIRY IN BIOETHICS 75-126 (2016) (symposium editor).
Prospective Autonomy and Dementia: Ulysses Contracts for VSED, 12(3) JOURNAL OF BIOETHICAL INQUIRY 389-394 (2015).
Legal Briefing: Voluntarily Stopping Eating and Drinking, 25(1) JOURNAL OF CLINICAL ETHICS 68-80 (2014) (with Amanda West).
Voluntarily Stopping Eating and Drinking: A Legal Treatment Option at the End of Life, 17(2) WIDENER LAW REVIEW 363-428 (2011) (with Lindsey Anderson).
4. Phyllis Shacter
Phyllis Shacter has one of the most comprehensive websites collecting all sorts of resources on VSED.
