Synopsis
Several recent trends - demographic, social, and economic - are increasing the incidence and public support of deliberate death among the old and sick. Barbara Logue examines this trend and its ethical implications, describing hazards inherent in our present long-term care system, noting that all too often the system causes suffering instead of alleviating it. After assessing the alternatives, she urges that we must make compassionate death control as available as birth control. We must regulate and monitor it like any other medical procedure, taking steps to minimize the risks while maximizing the benefits.
Reviews
This broad, complex look at the rights of the dying offers an unusually rich account of its subject. Logue, a Mississippi demographer, provides a revealing cross-cultural examination of the way nonindustrialized societies have dealt with their frail elderly. It's often not a pleasant picture--as with the Yakut of Siberia, who beat decrepit parents to death. But the point here, amply documented, is that medical care in the cost-containment-conscious United States is not much more civilized. The complex bureaucracies of nursing homes, medical insurance companies and hospices can hasten the demise of elderly people, sometimes even driving them to suicide. Conversely, she asserts, the propensity of modern medicine to prolong life against the will of an individual makes it crucial that society uphold our right to choose the way to die. Logue argues as well the right of physicians to assist patients in implementing the decision. The book shows how social science can serve social policy.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
``The advantages of deliberate death are too appealing to simply go away,'' asserts demographer Logue in this examination of the social forces that are driving us toward ``death control,'' especially for the old and frail. Logue draws frequent parallels between death control-- defined here as deliberate behavior that hastens death for a person suffering from an incurable condition, including the degenerative symptoms of old age--and birth control. Controlling reproduction, once a taboo topic and a criminal act, is now common practice, and Logue sees the same development occurring in the control of death as public acceptance of the idea, perception of its advantages, and the means of achievement come together. She considers the possible alternatives to death control, such as better care for the frail elderly, and concludes that improving care may actually lead to an increase in deliberate deaths as care-givers come to see that caring is consistent with letting- go, even with helping to let go. Logue acknowledges that death control has risks as well as advantages and that these risks are not spread evenly: gender, race, and class come into play. She's confident, however, that the risks can be minimized with proper legislation, and that just as we have done away with back-alley abortions, so can we do away with ``back-alley euthanasia.'' Opponents of death control will argue that the risks are inadequately explored here, but if Logue's goal is to document the growing acceptance of death control and to stimulate debate on the issue, she succeeds. A well-researched, clear presentation of a tough topic. (For an opposing view, see Rita Marker's Deadly Compassion, reviewed below.) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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