On Euthanasia, Resistance, and Redemption

Abstract

Euthanasia/assisted dying, the desire to hasten death, and religious supportive care at the end of life are controversial issues that have been heavily debated within the academic and medical communities. Little research has been done on hospice patients' views, despite hospices being political spaces, espousing a range of perspectives on assisted dying, religiosity, and "good deaths." In this article I document the presence, articulation, and significance of these issues as perceived and experienced by 20 hospice inpatients in the last 4 weeks of their lives. Key themes to emerge included polarization in desire for hastened death and assisted dying in the hospice; the hospice as a morally bound space situated within particular notions of "dying well"; and the divisive character of religion as part of formalized hospice care. Theoretically, the participants' perspectives on euthanasia/assisted dying and religiosity in the hospice provide a means of unpacking and revealing the moral economy of modern dying practices and the institutional governance and production of "timely deaths."

The Mortality of Family Business Leaders: Using a Palliative Care Model to Re-imagine Letting Go

“…Palliative care negotiates a delicate equilibrium among the dimensions of ‘being human,’ ‘having control, ‘relationship and belonging,’ and ‘maintaining the individual self’ (Adib-Hajbaghery & Aghajani, 2015). This notion is consistent across both long-standing family business succession literatures (e.g., Brundin & Sharma, 2012; LeBreton-Miller et al, 2004), and recent emotion governance literature (Randerson & Radu-Lefebvre, 2021), where tensions in succession include not only individual issues but family issues as well.…”

“…In facilitating good death, an individual acknowledges mortality, makes choices, and plans for dying (Broom, 2012). The process of advance care planning is a way to support selfdetermination, facilitate decision-making, and promote optimal end-of-life care (Fried & Drickamer, 2010).…”

Defining a Good Death: A deliberative democratic view

“…The ideal is for all affected parties to contribute to the formulation of the definition (2,4), but there is a danger that one party will dominate. Broom gives an example: having entered hospice, a patient becomes "subsumed within its ideological framing of 'the good death'" (24); in other words, the patient feels impotent in the face of the hospice's definition of a good death.…”

Using Latent Profile Analysis to Understand Health Practitioners’ Attitudes Toward Voluntary Assisted Dying

“…Although legislative changes can increase acceptance of relevant beliefs and practices (Eisner et al, 2021;Hogg, 2010;Tankard & Paluck, 2016), this does not appear to be the case in the context of assisted dying. This may be because VAD is still ethically and politically contentious among practitioners and the general public (Broom, 2012;Fontalis et al, 2018). This null finding suggests that top-down processes (i.e., laws and legal changes) may have relatively small effects on the perceived acceptability of VAD and practitioners' personal support for this practice.…”