Through keynote addresses and panel discussions by clinicians, lawyers, ethicists, religious leaders, institutional administrators, and experienced family members, participants will engage 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, NARRATIVE INQUIRY IN BIOETHICS (forthcoming 2016) (symposium editor).
Prospective Autonomy and Dementia: Ulysses Contracts for VSED, 12(3) JOURNAL OF BIOETHICAL INQUIRY (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).