Karen Ann Quinlan was an American woman who became an important figure in the history of the right to die controversy in the United States.
An advance healthcare directive, also known as living will, personal directive, advance directive, medical directive or advance decision, is a legal document in which a person specifies what actions should be taken for their health if they are no longer able to make decisions for themselves because of illness or incapacity. In the U.S. it has a legal status in itself, whereas in some countries it is legally persuasive without being a legal document.
A do-not-resuscitate order (DNR), also known as Do Not Attempt Resuscitation (DNAR), Do Not Attempt Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (DNACPR), no code or allow natural death, is a medical order, written or oral depending on the jurisdiction, indicating that a person should not receive cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) if that person's heart stops beating. Sometimes these decisions and the relevant documents also encompass decisions around other critical or life-prolonging medical interventions. The legal status and processes surrounding DNR orders vary in different polities. Most commonly, the order is placed by a physician based on a combination of medical judgement and patient involvement.
Utilitarian bioethics refers to the branch of bioethics that incorporates principles of utilitarianism to directing practices and resources where they will have the most usefulness and highest likelihood to produce happiness, in regards to medicine, health, and medical or biological research.
The right to die is a concept based on the opinion that human beings are entitled to end their life or undergo voluntary euthanasia. Possession of this right is often understood that a person with a terminal illness, incurable pain, or without the will to continue living, should be allowed to end their own life, use assisted suicide, or to decline life-prolonging treatment. The question of who, if anyone, may be empowered to make this decision is often the subject of debate.
The Terri Schiavo case was a series of court and legislative actions in the United States from 1998 to 2005, regarding the care of Theresa Marie Schiavo, a woman in an irreversible persistent vegetative state. Schiavo's husband and legal guardian argued that Schiavo would not have wanted prolonged artificial life support without the prospect of recovery, and in 1998, he elected to remove her feeding tube. Schiavo's parents disputed her husband's assertions and challenged Schiavo's medical diagnosis, arguing in favor of continuing artificial nutrition and hydration. The highly publicized and prolonged series of legal challenges presented by her parents, which ultimately involved state and federal politicians up to the level of President George W. Bush, caused a seven-year delay before Schiavo's feeding tube was ultimately removed.
Spiro Nikolouzos was a Texas man incapacitated from bleeding related to a cerebral shunt, whose care was the subject of an appeal of The Texas Futile Care Law.
Cruzan v. Director, Missouri Department of Health, 497 U.S. 261 (1990), was a landmark decision of the Supreme Court of the United States involving a young adult incompetent. The first "right to die" case ever heard by the Court, Cruzan was argued on December 6, 1989, and decided on June 25, 1990. In a 5–4 decision, the Court affirmed the earlier ruling of the Supreme Court of Missouri and ruled in favor of the State of Missouri, finding it was acceptable to require "clear and convincing evidence" of a patient's wishes for removal of life support. A significant outcome of the case was the creation of advance health directives.
The legislative, executive, and judicial branches, of both the United States federal government and the State of Florida, were involved in the case of Terri Schiavo. In November 1998 Michael Schiavo, husband of Terri Schiavo, first sought permission to remove his wife's feeding tube. Schiavo had suffered brain damage in February 1990, and in February 2000 had been ruled by a Florida circuit court to be in a persistent vegetative state. Her feeding tube was removed first on April 26, 2001, but was reinserted two days later on an appeal by her parents, Bob and Mary Schindler.
The case of Terri Schiavo became the subject of intense public debate and activism.
Tirhas Habtegiris was a United States resident originally from Eritrea, who, after being diagnosed as terminally ill, was removed from a respirator against the wishes of her family. Habtegiris had a form of cancer known as an abdominal angiosarcoma which had spread to her lungs.
Euthanasia is currently illegal in all 50 states of the United States. Assisted suicide is legal in 10 jurisdictions in the US: Washington, D.C. and the states of California, Colorado, Oregon, Vermont, New Mexico, Maine, New Jersey, Hawaii, and Washington. The status of assisted suicide is disputed in Montana, though currently authorized per the Montana Supreme Court's ruling in Baxter v. Montana that "nothing in Montana Supreme Court precedent or Montana statutes [indicates] that physician aid in dying is against public policy."
The Ashley Treatment refers to a controversial set of medical procedures performed on an American child, "Ashley X". Ashley, born in 1997, has severe developmental disabilities due to static encephalopathy; she is assumed to be at an infant level mentally, but continues to grow physically. The treatment included growth attenuation via high-dose estrogens, hysterectomy, bilateral breast bud removal, and appendectomy. In June 2016, after 18 years of searching, Ashley's condition was determined to be the result of a de novo and non-mosaic single-nucleotide polymorphism in the GRIN1 gene, which is implicated in neurotransmission.
Haleigh Poutre is an American woman who became the subject of a legal controversy regarding the removal of life support for patients in persistent vegetative states. In 2006, eleven-year-old Poutre awoke from a coma shortly before she was scheduled to be removed from life support. Poutre had a severe brain injury thought to be caused by abuse by her adoptive mother. The case brought about many changes in the Massachusetts Department of Social Services, both in the way they handle reports of child abuse as well as their policies on end-of-life care for children in their custody.
Eluana Englaro was an Italian woman from Lecco, who entered a persistent vegetative state on 18 January 1992, following a car accident, and subsequently became the focus of a court battle between supporters and opponents of euthanasia. Shortly after her accident, medical staff began feeding Englaro with a feeding tube, but her father "fought to have her feeding tube removed, saying it would be a dignified end to his daughter's life. He said that before the crash his daughter visited a friend who was in a coma and told him she didn't want the same thing to happen to her if she were ever in the same state." The authorities refused his request, but the decision was finally reversed in 2009, and she died after her nutrition was withheld after she had spent seventeen years in the persistent vegetative state.
The Texas Advance Directives Act (1999), also known as the Texas Futile Care Law, describes certain provisions that are now Chapter 166 of the Texas Health & Safety Code. Controversy over these provisions mainly centers on Section 166.046, Subsection (e), which allows a health care facility to discontinue life-sustaining treatment ten days after giving written notice if the continuation of life-sustaining treatment is considered futile care by the treating medical team.
The Joseph Maraachli case refers to an international controversy over the life of Joseph Maraachli, commonly known as Baby Joseph, a Canadian infant who was diagnosed with a rare progressive and incurable neurological disorder called Leigh's disease. After Canadian doctors refused to perform a tracheotomy, calling the procedure invasive and futile, Joseph's parents fought to have him transferred to the United States, arguing that while Joseph's disease was terminal, a tracheotomy would extend his life and allow him to die at home. After several months and efforts by American anti-abortion groups, Joseph was transferred to a Catholic hospital in St. Louis, Missouri, where the procedure was performed.
In 2001, in the case Conservatorship of Wendland, also known as Wendland v. Wendland, and the Robert Wendland case, the Supreme Court of California unanimously ruled that Rose Wendland, the wife of Robert Wendland, in the absence of a durable power of attorney for health care (DPAHC), did not have the authority to withhold artificial nutrition and hydration in her husband's behalf. The Court recognized that patients unable to make a decision for themselves should receive special protection according to the right to life and right to privacy provided by the California constitution.
Marlise Nicole Muñoz was an American woman at the center of a medical ethics controversy between November 2013 and January 2014. She suffered a suspected pulmonary embolism and was declared brain dead. Because she was pregnant, doctors at a Texas hospital kept her body on a ventilator in the intensive care unit despite the determination of brain death. Muñoz's husband entered a legal battle to have her removed from organ support. A Texas law restricts the application of advance directives in pregnant patients, but Muñoz's husband argued that the law was not applicable because his wife was legally dead. A judge ordered the hospital to remove organ support and her cardiac functions stopped on January 26, 2014.
