's challenging 2014 article "Narrative Ethics: A Narrative" [1]. You would be mistaken to think you were in for a simple tale with a clear-cut lesson. "Narrative Ethics: A Narrative" begins by recounting the short history of narrative medicine and narrative ethics from the late 1980s until about 2010. The narrative medicine part of the account is straightforward enough: attending to patient stories reaps benefits. Such narratives reveal patients' explanations for their illnesses and the meaning the experiences have for them; they give patients a voice in the medical story the physician is constructing. Physicians dedicated to healing welcome the understanding of their patients that these narratives provide.
The 1997 US Supreme Court ruling regarding physician-assisted suicide is often misrepresented or misunderstood. The question before the court was specific: Are state laws that criminalize physician-assisted suicide unconstitutional? The high court ruled that such laws were not unconstitutional. That ruling, however, did not make physician-assisted suicide a crime throughout the land. It declared, rather, that legalizing or criminalizing physician-assisted suicide (P-AS) was a matter of states' rights; that is, a matter for each state to decide for itself.Three years prior to the high court's decision, Oregon voters had approved a referendum legalizing P-AS by a slim margin of 51 percent. Following the Supreme Court ruling, Oregon offered the question to voters again, in November 1997, this time receiving a 60 percent majority in favor of legalizing the practice.Four states besides Oregon-Michigan, Washington, California, and Maine-have asked voters about P-AS, and voters in all 4 have turned it down. On the Maine referendum ballot in 2002, the question asked succinctly and in plain English: "Should a terminally ill adult who is of sound mind be allowed to ask for and receive a doctor's help to die?" Maine voters said "no" (meekly) by a vote of 51.5 percent to 48.5 percent.Forty-six states stand opposed to Oregon, formally criminalizing P-AS. Forty of them (most recently Ohio in November 2002) have passed statutes that prohibit the practice, and 6 prohibit it by common law. Three states-North Carolina, Utah, and Wyoming have neither criminalized nor legalized physician-assisted suicide.
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