Residency Requirements for Medical Aid in Dying.

In 1997, when Oregon became the first U.S. jurisdiction authorizing medical aid in dying (MAID), its law included a requirement that patients be legal residents of the state.

Cruzan after Dobbs: What Remains of the Constitutional Right to Refuse Treatment?

In 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court removed constitutional protection from the individual's right to end a pregnancy.

Ourselves, with Dementia.

Fear of dementia leads some people to demand an opportunity to choose death over life with the illness. They want the power to make advance euthanasia directives and to refuse hand feeding at some point in the dementia process. But the choices we make in advance aren't always suited to the people we become.

The UN Challenge to Guardianship and Surrogate Decision-Making.

In 2006, the United Nations issued the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. The Convention, together with an accompanying commentary, urges governments to abandon laws authorizing guardianship and substitute decision-making for people with intellectual disabilities and to replace them with supportive decision-making laws that give all individuals the freedom to make choices reflecting their "will and preferences." Although critics point to ethical and legal problems with this approach, the Convention and commentary offer guidance to clinicians, ethicists, and others involved in evaluating medical decision-making.

A Tangled Web: Deception in Everyday Dementia Care.

Care workers and families often engage in deception in everyday interactions with people affected by dementia. While benevolent deception can be justified, there are often more respectful and less risky ways to help people with dementia seeking to make sense of their lives.

The Limited Value of Dementia-Specific Advance Directives.

Many people are worried about developing dementia, fearing the losses and burdens that accompany the condition. Dementia-specific advance directives are intended to address dementia's progressive effects, allowing individuals to express their treatment preferences for different stages of the condition. But enthusiasm for dementia-specific advance directives should be tempered by recognition of the legal, ethical, and practical issues they raise.

Dementia and the Death Penalty.

During its 2018-2019 term, the United States Supreme Court considered the constitutionality of executing a prisoner with dementia. In Madison v. Alabama, the Court ruled that, in certain circumstances, executing a prisoner with dementia violates the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

The Reasonable Person Standard for Research Disclosure: A Reasonable Addition to the Common Rule.

The revised Common Rule adopts the reasonable person standard to guide research disclosure. Some members of the research community contend that the standard is confusing and ill-suited to the research oversight system. Yet the revised rule is not as radical as it might seem.

Research Information for Reasonable People.

In 2017, federal officials issued a revised version of the Common Rule, the federal regulations that govern much of the human subject research conducted in the United States. Two provisions on information disclosure have reportedly provoked confusion among researchers and people responsible for research oversight. These provisions incorporate the familiar and foundational legal concept known as the reasonable person standard, applying this to research disclosure.

Advance Directives and Discrimination against People with Dementia.

In the article "On Avoiding Deep Dementia," Norman Cantor defends a position that I suspect many readers share. In my years writing and speaking on advance directives and dementia, I've found that most people support one of two positions. They are convinced either that advance choices should control the treatment dementia patients receive or that the welfare of a person with dementia should sometimes take priority over earlier choices.

Preferences for learning different types of genome sequencing results among young breast cancer patients: Role of psychological and clinical factors.

The growing importance of genome sequencing means that patients will increasingly face decisions regarding what results they would like to learn. The present study examined psychological and clinical factors that might affect these preferences. 1,080 women diagnosed with breast cancer at age 40 or younger completed an online survey.

A Tale of Two Disciplines: .

Fascination with In re Quinlan, the first high-profile right-to-die case in the United States, led the author to law school. By the time she received her law degree, bioethics was emerging as a field of study, and law and bioethics became her field. The mission of legal education is to teach students to "think like a lawyer," which can be a productive way to approach issues in many fields, including bioethics.

A Deep Dive into Community Engagement.

Community engagement offers opportunities to enhance the value of health research. Through engaging with community partners, researchers can pursue projects that produce meaningful benefits for study populations. At the same time, engagement presents challenges for everyone involved.

Inclusion, Access, and Civility in Public Bioethics.

I could tell many war stories about my experience serving on the President's Council on Bioethics-one of the most controversial national bioethics commissions so far-but I want to focus instead on how the experience influenced my views on bioethics, politics, and the potential contributions of national commissions. The executive order that established the Council directed it to consider policy questions, but it spoke primarily of providing a forum for national discussion, inquiry, and education. In this sense, the Council's mission departed from that of other national bioethics commissions, which have had more direct policy functions.

How, who, and when: preferences for delivery of genome sequencing results among women diagnosed with breast cancer at a young age.

Background: The increasing use of genome sequencing with patients raises a critical communication challenge: return of secondary findings. While the issue of what sequencing results should be returned to patients has been examined, much less attention has been paid to developing strategies to return these results in ways that meet patients' needs and preferences. To address this, we investigated delivery preferences (i.

Medicare and Advance Planning: The Importance of Context.

In January 2016, a long-delayed Medicare change took effect. The Medicare program will now reimburse doctors for time they spend talking with patients about end-of-life care. This is the move that Sarah Palin and other Affordable Care Act critics said would authorize government "death panels" to decide whether older Americans should live or die.

First-in-human HIV-remission studies: reducing and justifying risk.

Interest and excitement surround the possibility of developing measures that produce sustained or permanent HIV remission in infected individuals. First-in-human (FIH) trials are one step in exploring this possibility. Initial human trials raise the usual ethical issues associated with human research, and a set of distinct issues.