4th Global Conference
Wednesday 12th July - Friday 14th July 2006
Mansfield College, Oxford
Session 8B: Aspects of Euthanasia
Chair: Jan Bleyen
Convenient Arrangements with Death: A Sociological Study on Euthanasia
in France
Florence
Ollivier
Allocataire de recherche, Doctorante en sociologie à l'EHESS, Laboratoire
Cultures et sociétés urbaines, CNRS, France
Since the advent
of Bioethics, doctors have claimed the role of supervisor or care taker
the use of Human Body regulations, as the Catholic moral established
the ideal attitudes towards the correct use of our bodies. Modern techniques
of resuscitation have provided knowledge and skills to prolong life or
to provoke death. The medical powers tend to be criticised but this is
not the decline of their authority. The patient tends to be recognized
as a subjective person. But what happens when the patient claims the “right
to die”? Are we, as members of society,
allowed to choose death for another human being ?
For this study, we
have tried to understand and explain how a patient could request help
in order to die, and how this “question”,
if there is a sole and unique question, is interpreted, and moreover
understand how a doctor could practice “euthanasia” even
if there is an absence of request.
Our study has been focused on the
attitudes of doctors confronted with this “request”, and
with difficult decision in the context of the end-of-life. In our choice,
we have tried to vary doctors’s
specialities in order to obtain a large multiple context of the end-of-life
situation (urban environment, rural environment, hospital/ home). We
have examined how the question of “euthanasia” is understood
in accordance with the speciality of doctors.
We have defined four types
of doctor’s attitudes towards the end-of-life
situation, which are more or less well appreciated. A distinction is
obvious by the choice of the drug treatment. These practices are revealed
to young doctors during their hospital training. However, the practice
of euthanasia is quite perceived as a negative point for both doctors
and the medical profession. This can help us to understand why this practice
is renamed “accompaniment” or “stopping care”.
Behind this nebulous vocabulary, euthanasia is practiced as much in hospital
as at home, but with different drugs and in a different situation. Euthanasia
is rarely denounced by families, because it is often a result of a consensus.
A denunciation of euthanasia is more likely to arise from a conflictual
situation within the medical staff.
The dying patient is stigmatized
and dispossessed, his death is the source of a power conflict where the
survivors try to bring forth their values and their needs, this often
reveals their anxieties. An end-of-life negotiated by the patient could
be only take place in the case where all the family and doctor(s) agree
with his or her decision. In this way, the patient is dependant on survivors.
The dying patient remains alive until all survivors are more or less
accepted to leave him. How
can this be taken into consideration by a society which is not able to
face death?
The Body of Necessities in Finnish Discourse
on Euthanasia
Leila
Jylhänkangas
Department of Comparative Religion,
University of Helsinki,
Finland
The purpose of this study is to examine some of the different perspectives held on ways people discuss on euthanasia in contemporary Finnish society as well as to shed light on representations of illness, pain and acceptable ways of dying in euthanasia discourse. The data in this study consist of qualitative interviews with religious specialists (mainly priests) and letters in which ordinary Finns discuss euthanasia. Arguments today often focus on the question of whether a terminally ill individual should be allowed to die with active death assistance. Although active euthanasia has not been legalised in Finland, the issue occasionally arises in the Finnish media. Unsurprisingly, the data reflect people’s interest in discussing euthanasia. Cultural constructions of the body serve to sustain views of social relations. Human beings relate to each other through their visible body, a body that sees and can be seen. Euthanasia discourse represents different kinds of bodies. One of them concerns the body of necessities, a human body dependent on the help of other people to maintain basic, necessary vital functions and everyday hygiene. Here I define the body of necessities as something that is crucially related to dying, the last stages of human life. Pain, suffering and death are considered unwelcome intrusions into the midst of a happy life. Images of uncleanliness and the unpleasant sights surrounding death can sometimes become intolerable. The images of the last stages of one’s life are often associated with fear and despair. The data suggest one to ask the following questions: What themes and subthemes do people construct concerning illness and suffering? How do representations of euthanasia relate to those themes?
The Right for "Dignified Death":
Religiosity and attitudes Towards Euthanasia among Social Science Students
in Israel
Dan
Soen
Multidisciplinary Social Sciences Dept., The College of
Judea & Samaria, Israel; Kibbutzim School of Education, Tel-Aviv,
Israel
The
paper deals with the attitudes of Israeli social sciences students towards
physician-assisted death (PAD), in view of the marked increase in approval
rates of voluntary termination of life practices for the terminally ill.
Basically the paper sets out to assess the relationship between the students’ self-identified
religiosity and their attitudes towards euthanasia. It analyzes the findings
of an exploratory study carried out on a purposive sample of 127 social
sciences students in an Israeli public college.
The
administered questionnaire was meant to trace three components of the students’ attitudes
to PAD: affective, cognitive and conative. It embraced two parts, one dealing
with feelings and opinions, the other – with ideological-behavioral attitudes.
All
in all, the study revealed that religiosity plays a major role in shaping attitudes
towards assisted end-of-life, both in as much as the affective, cognitive and
conative components of the students’ attitudes are concerned. However,
the study also revealed that lukewarm support for euthanasia transcends religiosity.
It turned out that even the secular students’ support for PAD was very
reserved. One conclusion of the Paper is that the institutional character or
climate of the studied College was a possible major contributor to that uncharacteristic
conservative attitude!
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