Author:
Miles Steven H.,August Allison
Abstract
Public policy with regard to decisions to forgo life-sustaining medical care has dramatically changed over 15 years. Courts, legislatures, and professional bodies recognize a patient's right to refuse treatment despite civic or medical values that favor prolonging life. The United States Supreme Court has taken up this issue on an appeal of Missouri's Supreme Court decision ordering tube feeding for comatose Nancy Cruzan over her family's objections. The right to refuse life-sustaining treatment exemplifies a changing accommodation between controversial personal choices and the values our society holds collectively. As with other civil rights issues to come before the Court, the courts embody the very cultural canon they critique and redefine.While the relevance of the American tenet of individualism to the “right to die” (properiy, the “righi to refuse life-sustaining treatment”) is well recognized, the role of our culture's view of gender in these decisions is not appreciated.
Publisher
Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Reference31 articles.
1. 17. New Mexico's Supreme Court similarly attempted to medicalize decisions about whether to terminate dialysis for a comatose, demented man whose family and physicians proposed that the patient would not have wanted the treatment. The resulting uproar led to new legislation (Smith, 1983).
2. 21. There is less than one chance in 200 that the ratio of two of 14 constructed treatment preferences for women is equivalent to the six of eight constructed preferences for men (Chi square # 8.12, df 1, p. ff.005).
3. 31. Rhoden profoundly criticizes constructed treatment preferences, which she calls a “subjective” test. She points out that they place such a heavy burden on family that they have the effect of disempowering family. N.K. Rhoden, “Litigating Life and Death,” Harvard Law Rev. 102 (1988):375–404. Marcus et al., op. cit. similarly explore the jurisprudential issues of inclusive solutions.
4. 6. See also discussion of Newman (Fed, 1988), note 14.
5. “On Language Gender, and Working Class History,”;Scott;International Labor and Working Class History,1987
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