May 21, 2025
A New Edition of Bioethics Is Now Available
Bioethics (vol. 39, no. 4, 2025) is available online by subscription only. Articles include:
End of Life
May 16, 2025
Hospital tells family brain-dead Georgia woman must carry fetus due to abortion ban
(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
Prisons Routinely Ignore Guidelines on Dying Inmates’ End-of-Life Choices
(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
Fragments for the End of Life
(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
‘You can let go now’: inside the hospital where staff treat fear of death as well as physical pain
(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
Terri Schiavo’s death 20 years ago sparked lingering debate about death and politics
(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
What is the meaning of life? 15 possible answers – from a palliative care doctor, a Holocaust survivor, a jail inmate and more
(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
Autopsies Can Reveal Intimate Health Details. Should They Be Kept Private?
(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 COVID Mistake No One Talks Enough About
(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
A New Edition of Nursing Ethics Is Now Available
Nursing Ethics (vol. 32, no. 2, 2025) is available online by subscription only. Articles include:
February 21, 2025
Chatbots of the Dead
(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
Hospitality at the end of life: Owners open their homes to terminally ill
(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
What the ‘moral distress’ of doctors tells us about eroding trust in health care
(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
‘I wanted to buy her time’: A mother looks back on her daughter’s terminal cancer
(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
ADHD’s Sobering Life-Expectancy Numbers
(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
February 3, 2025
Dash for assisted dying ignores palliative care
(The Times) – A palliative care doctor is called to A&E to attend to an elderly man who has arrived in severe pain with metastasised prostate cancer. “I just want to die,” he tells her. Yet when she sits with … Read More
February 3, 2025
Should you let ChatGPT write your grandma’s obituary?
(Vox) – The people turning to generative AI for their most sensitive messages. Users found AI helpful when writing emails and recommendation letters, and even to spruce up responses on dating apps, as the number of chatbots available for experimentation … Read More
January 17, 2025
Undertaking Poetry: Pursuing the drama of overcoming–in art and life
(The Hedgehog Review) – The way we observe a death is expressive of our sense of a life’s meaning, of its shape and the terms of its success or failure. The “last ride” for a biker; the gun salute for … Read More
January 9, 2025
Peter Fenwick, Leading Expert on Near-Death Experiences, Dies at 89
(New York Times) – He was a neuropsychiatrist who was studying consciousness when a patient explained what had happened to him, and he realized the phenomenon was real. In early 1988, the British neuropsychiatrist Peter Fenwick found himself drowning in … Read More
December 23, 2024
Top 10 Causes of Death in America
(U.S. News & World Report) – Nearly 3.1 million U.S. residents died in 2023, according to final data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – roughly 189,000 fewer than in 2022. The age-adjusted rate of mortality in 2023 … Read More
December 17, 2024
‘Life-Changing’ Psychedelics, for When Life Is Ending
(DNYUZ) – In the months since, the angst and depression triggered by his cancer diagnosis no longer hound him, Mr. Blechman said, and he has gained profound insights into aspects of his personality he believes negatively affected his relationships. “Psilocybin … Read More
December 4, 2024
If My Dying Daughter Could Face Her Mortality, Why Couldn’t the Rest of Us?
(New York Times) – In the time since she left us, I have thought often of Orli’s question. All that spring, Orli asked, pointedly, why did we think a cure was still possible, that cancer would not continue to return? … Read More
December 4, 2024
A New Edition of Christian Bioethics Is Now Available
Christian Bioethics (vol. 30, no. 3, 2024) is available online by subscription only. Articles include:
November 26, 2024
The radical treatments bringing people back from the brink of death
(New Scientist) – Reperfusion technologies that can reanimate human brains are raising the possibility that death could be a reversible condition, even hours after a cardiac arrest That was when something incredible happened. The cortex turned from grey to pink. … Read More
November 22, 2024
Help in the Land of Forgetfulness
(Plough) – A husband caring for a loved one with dementia finds dark valleys, but also limitless spiritual resources. Sherwin B. Nuland, MD, in How We Die, describes the experience of dementia caregivers as “spiritually exhausting.” At times, that was my … Read More
