Ezekiel Emanuel
Ezekiel Emanuel
Ezekiel Jonathan "Zeke" Emanuelis an American oncologist and bioethicist and fellow at the Center for American Progress. He was an associate professor at the Harvard Medical School, before joining the National Institutes of Health in 1998. He has served as the Diane and Robert Levy University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and chair of the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy since September 2011 and holds a joint appointment at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
CountryUnited States of America
Physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia have been profound ethical issues confronting doctors since the birth of Western medicine, more than 2,000 years ago.
Americans tend to endorse the use of physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia when the question is abstract and hypothetical.
Patients who are being kept alive by technology and want to end their lives already have a recognized constitutional right to stop any and all medical interventions, from respirators to antibiotics. They do not need physician-assisted suicide or euthanasia.
By establishing a social policy that keeps physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia illegal but recognizes exceptions, we would adopt the correct moral view: the onus of proving that everything had been tried and that the motivation and rationale were convincing would rest on those who wanted to end a life.
Everyone's got an intuition about the risk of everyday life. We thought, 'Wouldn't it be great if we could quantify it?' And once you begin to do that, you realize that everyday life is not benign.
You have to stop blaming the victim here. When you see it's about access -- not bringing enough minorities in -- that means the responsibility is on us, the researchers and research institutions.
The assumption should be that we will not appear in print or the blogosphere. Having dinner should not be fodder for Facebook. And this is just as true for 'public personalities' as it is for the average person. After all, even people in the public eye have a right to a private life.
We said, 'Wow, he must have some data,'
Truth be told, for a 21st Century American Jew there is something hollow in the Seder's liberation story and the commandment to feel as if you were there.
They were very low numbers -- actually, lower than I anticipated. Considering the scope of the debate, you would think this was a major, common occurrence.
It is terrible when an infant dies, but worse, most people think, when a three-year-old child dies, and worse still when an adolescent does.
On any given day, my father wasn't likely to return from work before I was asleep for the night. I saw that a man's work was important, that he must pursue it tirelessly, and that it might require certain sacrifices, like being away from the warmth and comfort of home.
The death of a 20-year-old woman is intuitively worse than that of a 2-month-old girl, even though the baby has had less life. The 20-year-old has a much more developed personality than the infant, and has drawn upon the investment of others to begin as-yet-unfulfilled projects.
As an academic, what do you have? You have the quality of your work and the integrity with which you do it.