Framing the Issue The question of whether severely ill suffering patients are entitled to a physician’s help to end their suffering by ending their lives has been debated since antiquity. The Hippocratic Oath suggested that this was outside of the physician’s professional responsibilities, but ev...

“Bioethics” has been defined in several different ways. Most broadly, it is the interdisciplinary study of ethical, legal, and social issues arising in the life sciences and health care. Though it has roots tracing back decades or generations earlier, modern bioethics is widely held to have aris...