ABSTRACT
Death is no longer seen as "something that happens to you", but "something you do". In this essay the author explores what might motivate such a shift, and how changes in a decisional perspective from an "enmeshed" to a distanced but still personal perspective may make physician-assisted suicide a societal preferred alternative. On the one side, supporters of legalization appeal to the principle of autonomy, or self-determination, to insist that terminally ill patients have the right to extricate themselves from pain and suffering and to control as much as possible the ends of their lives. On the other, opponents resolutely insist on various religious, principled, or slippery-slope grounds that physician-assisted suicide cannot be allowed, whether because it is sacrilegious, immoral, or poses risks of abuse. Some patients also negotiate, or attempt to negotiate, physician-assisted suicide or physician-performed euthanasia with their physicians. Attitudes about death are heavily socially conditioned, and so are the perspectives from which choice-making about death is seen.
