The nation’s largest physicians organization is taking up the issue of medically-assisted suicide this week and will decide whether to revise the association’s longstanding code of ethics, The Washington Post reports.
The American Medical Association currently maintains that physician-assisted suicides are “fundamentally incompatible with the physician’s role as healer, would be difficult or impossible to control, and would pose serious societal risks.”
The AMA House of Delegates meets in Chicago to debate and vote on the issue.
“The mere fact that they're considering it again tells you that it's a changing climate,” Art Caplan, head of medical ethics at the New York University School of Medicine, told the Post. “The reality is there are many more doctors in the AMA, but also outside the AMA, who have changed their minds about this.” And opinions, he predicted, will “continue to evolve.”
Six states and the District of Columbia have legalized the practice, but it remains divisive, and AMA's Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs, which has spent two years reviewing resolutions, has recommended the code not be amended.
"After careful consideration, CEJA 20 concludes that in its current form the Code offers guidance to support physicians and the patients 21 they serve in making well-considered, mutually respectful decisions about legally available options 22 for care at the end of life in the intimacy of a patient-physician relationship," it wrote in a paper published in mid-May.
Doctors and delegates show strong support for the status quo on AMA's website, according to the Post, and columnists for the New York Times and USA Today said the AMA should still oppose assisted suicide.
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