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Last Rights

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This detailed look at the right-to-die movement is as impressive for its compassion as it is for its scope. As medical advances offer the possibility of longer life even in the shadow of grave illness, questions about patients' choices and quality of life become more and more relevant to all of us. Woodman has done her homework and summarizes the principle viewpoints concisely -- and always with deep sympathy both for the dying and their care-givers.

Last Rights is a comprehensive and insightful examination of the right to die movement in the United States and around the world. Filled with personal details not found in other books. Not concerned with merely repeating "politically correct" versions of events. It is a valuable new addition to "end-of-life" literature.

Sue Woodman
Last Rights:
The Struggle over the Right to Die

(New York: Plenum, 1998) 293 pages
(ISBN: 0-306-45995-7; hardcover)
(Library of Congress call number: R726.W655 1998)

Sue Woodman is a journalist,
who has read deeply in the history of the right-to-die movement.
She summarizes the well-known cases that attracted media attention.
And she illustrates the need for the right-to-die
in the lives of several people who were forced to live too long.

When this book was written, Dr. Jack Kevorkian
was the most famous person in the right-to-die movement.
Serious doubts were raised about some of the deaths he assisted.

Should physicians help their patients to die?
Doctors come down on both sides of this question.

Disabled people usually reject any talk of the right-to-die
because they fear that they will be forced into death
because able-bodied people think their lives are not worth living.

Opponents of the right-to-die can cite many cases in which people died before their time.
Mistakes and abuses can and do occur under the name of the right-to-die.

The Roman Catholic Church is one of the best-organized
and best-funded opponents of the right-to-die.
And yet, even Roman Catholic morality allows withdrawal of life-supports.

This book is mostly of historical interest now,
since there have been several important developments since the middle 1990s.
But Sue Woodman tells us the stories and introduces us to some of the people
from the early years of the right-to-die movement.

If you would like to see other books on these themes,
search the Internet for: "Books on the Right-to-Die".

James Leonard Park, advocate of the right-to-die with careful safeguards.