hen he would die was Jan van den Broeks last wish. In the last minutes of his life, his wife and children sat by his bed at home, holding his hand, watching as two family doctors prepared to administer the lethal fluid. The physical and mental aspects of suffering are always intertwined. A person with lung cancer who has witnessed fellow patients drown in their own lung secretions may be terrified about his/her future, and might seek reassurance that a physician would ease his/her death if terminal suffocation sets in. Unless doctors are allowed to consider the psychological suffering of their patients, they will be reduced to treating bodies instead of people. Though few patients reach this desperate state, doctors need to be able to respond to their needs. Whether created through legislatures, referendums, or the courts, a public policy is needed to ensure that patients will approach the final phase of life knowing there is escape should they face their worst scenario. Likewise, opinion polls show that a majority of Americans want to help terminally ill patients, suffering intolerably, to end their lives. Yet there is no consensus on the best way to give doctors that legal authority. Although many see the courts as a good place to start giving doctors this kind of legal authority. In a major right-to-die case, New Yorks top court ruled that a Long Island man must pay a nursing home for its life sustaining care of his comatose wife, even though he had asked that she be allowed to die. The unanimous ruling by the Court of Appeals underscored the strictness of New Yorks laws and legal precedents on the rights of patients and their relatives to terminate life. And it gave new impetus (Sack 24A) to call for the Legislature to expand the rights of family members to make medical decisions for incapacitated relatives. In conclusion, although the subject of euthanasia is a sticky topic it is one that...
