Advance Directives and the Pursuit of Death with Dignity

An advance medical directive is a device aimed at controlling medical intervention during the dying process after a patient is no longer competent. Because of its ambiguous legal status and the ambivalence of medical personnel, it is still uncertain whether the advance directive will be a successful tool in the individual's struggle to retain a modicum of dignity in the face of modern life-prolonging technology. After examining the issues surrounding future-oriented medical decision making, Cantor outlines the legal foundation and framework governing advance directives and considers how such documents should be drafted in light of that legal framework. He suggests guidelines for implementing advance medical directives, anticipating the major problems likely to confront administrators of such directives, and discusses possible channels for enforcement of directives when health-care providers balk at implementation. Finally, he considers the moral foundation and the moral limits of future-oriented autonomy. This book will be an important resource for any person involved in the design or application of an advance medical directive - physicians, nurses, hospital social workers, administrators of health-care institutions, lawyers, clergy, and lay people seriously concerned about exercising control over the dying process in today's high-tech medical environment.

"[Cantor provides] both a cogent and provocative text and prodigious references." --The New England Journal of Medicine

"Cantor develops a careful and accessible ethic of autonomy and dignity regarding forgoing life-prolonging medical treatment... " --Ethics

"A thoughtful, informative and sensitive text... " --European Medical Journal

"Professor Cantor of Rutgers University School of Law has created a scholarly and sophisticated, yet quite accessible, legal analysis of the subject of advance directives... detailed, exhaustively referenced... " --The Florida Bar Journal

"This book is an excellent resource for anyone interested in learning about advance directives for health care." --Doody's Health Sciences Book Review Journal

"Cantor provides a very thorough, reliable, and readable guide... " --Robert M. Veatch, Director, Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Georgetown University

Cantor examines the medical, legal, and moral issues surrounding advance medical directives--those devices aimed at controlling medical intervention during the dying process after the patient is no longer competent.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 171-202) and index.

NORMAN L. CANTOR is Professor of Law and Justice Nathan L. Jacobs Scholar at Rutgers University School of Law, Newark, and is also a member of the Faculty of Law at Tel Aviv University. He served as an advisor to counsel in the Karen Ann Quinlan case and as advisor to the New Jersey Bioethics Committee. He is author of Legal Frontiers of Death and Dying and numerous law journal articles covering legal aspects of death and dying.