The book strives for as complete and dispassionate a description of the situation as possible and covers in detail: the substantive law applicable to euthanasia, physician-assisted suicide, withholding and withdrawing treatment, use of pain relief in potentially lethal doses, terminal sedation, and termination of life without a request (in particular in the case of newborn babies); the process of legal development that has led to the current state of the law; the system of legal control and its operation in practice; and, the results of empirical research concerning actual medical practice.
Switzerland's laws that prohibit killing continue to apply in full. Direct, active euthanasia (deliberate killing in order to end the suffering of another person) is therefore also forbidden. By contrast, both indirect, active euthanasia (the use of means having side-effects that may shorten life) and passive euthanasia (rejecting or discontinuing life-prolonging measures) – while not governed by any specific statutory provisions – are not treated as criminal offences provided certain conditions are fulfilled. No legislative action is needed with regard to these three forms of euthanasia. Legal restrictions and a ban on organised assisted suicide are nonetheless open to debate. They are intended to protect human life better, and to prevent organised assisted suicide becoming a profit-driven business.
Marlisa Tiedemann Dominique Valiquet Law and Government Division Revised 17 July 2008 PRB 07-03E PARLIAMENTARY INFORMATION AND RESEARCH SERVICE SERVICE D’INFORMATION ET DE RECHERCHEPARLEMENTAIRES
This short paper for one of the world's leading bioethics journals introduces readers to medical tourism - the travel of patients from their home country to another for the primary purpose of seeking medical treatment. The paper divides medical tourism into three types: (1) Medical tourism for services illegal in both the patient's home and destination countries (e.g., organ transplant tourism); (2) Medical tourism for services that are illegal in the patient's home country but legal in the destination country (e.g., some forms of fertility tourism, euthanasia tourism, experimental drug tourism); (3) Medical tourism for services legal in both the home and destination country (e.g., traveling abroad for a heart valve or hip replacement). The paper then discusses several difficult ethical and regulatory challenges posed by each type of medical tourism.
Australians in their 20s and 30s are killing themselves with the drug that euthanasia advocate, Dr Philip Nitschke, has promoted as the ''peaceful pill''. The Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine has found that 51 people in Australia have died from an overdose of Nembutal in the past 10 years. While the lethal barbiturate is only available for veterinarians to euthanise animals in Australia, Dr Nitschke has been helping people obtain it from Mexican vets and other overseas sources since the late 1990s.
Whether the world will one day reach a consensus as to euthanasia and assisted suicide is anyone's guess. In the meantime, the legality of these procedures differs among jurisdictions, and as always some will be tempted to travel in search of that which they cannot get at home. But unlike other areas in which residents of one state or country can take advantage of another's liberality - laws on alcohol, marijuana, and gambling come to mind - the stakes and finality of end-of-life decisions make traveling to undergo life-ending procedures, or "death tourism," of unique concern to policymakers. The United States, save for Oregon and Washington (and maybe Montana), has for the time being decided against legalizing life-ending procedures. As such, state and federal governments would probably take issue with Americans traveling to get help dying. In this Article, I explore the phenomenon of death tourism and how our governments might attempt to prevent its exploitation by Americans.