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More and more people who are terminally ill are choosing assisted suicide. When is it Right to Die? offers a different path with alternatives of hope, compassion, and death with real dignity. Joni Eareckson Tada knows what it means to wrestle with this issue and to wish for a painless solution. For the last 50 years she has been confined to a wheelchair and struggled against her own paralysis. And she sat by the bedside of her dying father, thinking, So much suffering, why not end it all quickl...

The coronavirus pandemic has made society's relationship with death and dying everybody's business. We have had to confront new challenges around the way we care for dying people, yet the old problems have not gone away. In February 2018, Dennis Eccleston, suffering in agony from terminal cancer, took an overdose of pain medication to end his own life, helped by his wife Mavis. Mavis was charged with murder. The turmoil that followed sheds light on the brutal impact of the UK's failure to lega...

One of Marie Fleming's last acts before she died from Multiple Sclerosis in late 2013 was to complete her memoir. A woman described by the High Court President as 'one of the most remarkable witnesses to come before the courts', during her landmark case against the Irish State to lift the ban on assisted suicide, here she tells the personal story behind the public face.From her young years growing up in Donegal, as she struggled to keep her family together after her mother left, to her battle to...

While Eleanor Clift cared for her husband, journalist Tom Brazaitis, through the last two weeks of his life, the nation watched a very different death play out as Terri Schiavo entered her final days. In the commonalities and contradictions between these events, Clift probes the underlying questions: How should we handle the decisions surrounding a loved one's death? What if that loved one did not--or cannot--speak to us about these issues?

This book provides a comprehensive and contemporary examination of the right-to-die issues facing society now that vast improvements in public health care and medicine have resulted in people not only living longer but taking much longer to die-often in great pain and suffering. In 1900, the average age at which people died in America was 47 years of age; the primary causes of death were tuberculosis and other respiratory illnesses. In the 21st century, as a result of better health care and wor...