Vulnerable People
Practical Rejoinders to Claims in Favor of Assisted Suicide
Published In: In Foley K, Hendin H (eds.) The Case Against Assisted Suicide: For the Right to End-of-Life Care (Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins University Press, 2002), Chapter 11, p. 238-260
Posted on RAND.org on January 01, 2002
In this chapter, the authors argue that -nine of the most common and most compelling arguments for legalizing physician-assisted suicide are unpersuasive or misleading. They then present their positions against those nine arguments, which range from The public wants physician-assisted suicide to the law can protect people from abuses of physician-assisted suicide. The authors conclude that the community would be better off keeping physician-assisted suicide illegal while learning how to provide reliable, good care to all with serious, eventually fatal illnesses.
This report is part of the RAND Corporation External publication series. Many RAND studies are published in peer-reviewed scholarly journals, as chapters in commercial books, or as documents published by other organizations.
The RAND Corporation is a nonprofit institution that helps improve policy and decisionmaking through research and analysis. RAND's publications do not necessarily reflect the opinions of its research clients and sponsors.