June 12, 2025
(The Telegraph) – Flush and bone rituals proposed as a new, ‘gentler’ funerary method People could soon be able to choose to be boiled and flushed down the drain instead of cremated or buried. A consultation on funerary methods by … Read More
June 10, 2025
(The Atlantic) – As a professional writer, my first thought was that this would be unnecessary, at best. At worst, it would be an outrage. The philosopher Martin Heidegger held that someone’s death is a thing that is truly their … Read More
June 9, 2025
(Wired) – A federal investigation found a Kentucky nonprofit pushed hospital workers toward surgery despite signs of revival in patients. Four years ago, an unconscious Kentucky man began to awaken as he was about to be removed from life support … Read More
June 6, 2025
(Care) – Dr Philip Nitschke, inventor of the Sarco suicide pod, has unveiled plans for a controversial new device: an implantable ‘kill switch’ that would allow people diagnosed with dementia to end their lives at a later stage, regardless of … Read More
June 6, 2025
(The Spectator) – The hospice movement is one of the great achievements of post-war Britain. Inspired by the doctor Cicely Saunders, who in effect founded the field of palliative care, it has united cutting-edge research with a profound understanding of … Read More
June 5, 2025
(Ms.) – In 28 states, if you’re pregnant, the government can ignore your end-of-life wishes—no matter what you’ve written. Reproductive freedom advocates filed a lawsuit, Vernon v. Kobach, on May 29 challenging the constitutionality of a Kansas law that automatically invalidates a person’s end-of-life treatment … Read More
June 3, 2025
(Daily Mail) – A euthanasia advocate who was quizzed by murder detectives after the death of a woman using a controversial Sarco euthanasia pod last year has died by assisted suicide, it was announced yesterday. Dr Florian Willet, 47, was … Read More
June 2, 2025
(New York Times) — When Canada’s first MAID law, Bill C-14, passed in 2016, it was reserved for those who were over 18, eligible for health care and mentally competent to consent to death. They needed to have a “serious … Read More
June 2, 2025
(People) — A Harvard employee accused of stealing body parts from a morgue at the university and selling them for a profit entered a guilty plea to a federal charge of interstate transport of human remains this week. Cedric Lodge, … Read More
June 2, 2025
(Daily Mail) — A controversial amendment allowing assisted suicide is making its way through the Illinois state legislature as representatives snuck the measure into a bill on sanitary food preparation. Illinois House Majority Leader Robyn Gabel, a Democrat representing Evanston, … Read More
May 21, 2025
Bioethics (vol. 39, no. 4, 2025) is available online by subscription only. Articles include:
May 16, 2025
(NPR) – A pregnant woman in Georgia who was declared brain dead after a medical emergency has been on life support for three months to let the fetus grow enough to be delivered, a move her family says a hospital … Read More
May 15, 2025
(KFF Health News) – As the country’s incarcerated population ages rapidly, thousands die behind bars each year. For some researchers, medical providers, and families of terminally ill people in custody, Rigsby’s situation — and Moser’s frustration — are familiar: Incarcerated … Read More
April 25, 2025
(The Hedgehog Review) – Ars Moriendi for the Twenty-first Century There have always been many ways of dying badly. In the late eighteenth century, the devout English writer Samuel Johnson struggled furiously and profanely against his own demise, ordering his … Read More
April 24, 2025
(The Guardian) – In a Danish palliative care unit, the alternative to assisted dying is not striving to cure, offering relief and comfort to patients and their families The way we die is a topic of a heated debate in … Read More
March 31, 2025
(USA Today) – Monday marks 20 years since the death of Terri Schiavo, whose landmark case became the symbol of the “right to die” movement, generated political controversy and sparked public outcry as her husband and family members took their … Read More
March 26, 2025
(The Guardian) – During the three months I spent living in the holiday park, walking the cliffs and trying to figure out my life, these responses greatly inspired me. Perhaps, as Wolf Hall author Hilary Mantel alluded to in her … Read More
March 21, 2025
(MIT Technology Review) – The goal of an autopsy is to discover the cause of a person’s death. Autopsy reports, especially those resulting from detailed investigations, often reveal health conditions—conditions that might have been kept private while the person was … Read More
March 18, 2025
(The Atlantic) – The tragedy of people suffering and dying alone is one of the enduring and unaddressed traumas of the pandemic. During early surges, we restricted visits to stop COVID from spreading. Yet even when the number of infections … Read More
February 24, 2025
Nursing Ethics (vol. 32, no. 2, 2025) is available online by subscription only. Articles include:
February 21, 2025
(Aeon) – We can now create compelling experiences of talking with our dead. Is this ghoulish, therapeutic or something else again? These apps and algorithms are part of a growing class of technologies that marry artificial intelligence (AI) with the … Read More
February 17, 2025
(Washington Post via MSN) – In a pastoral Vermont valley, a former hospice chaplain named Suzanne runs a retreat center for artists, health-care workers and educators — and, since mid-2023, terminally ill people seeking a safe, peaceful place to die. … Read More
February 4, 2025
(The Conversation) – Bioethics, a modern academic field that helps resolve such fraught dilemmas, evolved in its early decades through debates over several landmark cases in the 1970s to the 1990s. The early cases helped establish the right of patients … Read More
February 3, 2025
(NPR) – Wildman also wrote about the expert medical care Orli received — and the unwillingness of some doctors and nurses to speak openly and realistically about what she was facing. Wildman believes the medical establishment tends to view the … Read More
February 3, 2025
(The Atlantic) – Some of the most life-threatening impacts of ADHD may be the least conspicuous, experts told me. Missing doctor appointments, forgetting to take medications, and struggling to navigate the health-care system can make existing illnesses worse. What leads … Read More
