Acceptability for French People of Physician-Assisted Suicide

The authors sought to better understand how French people judge the acceptability of physician-assisted suicide (PAS). They found that, for people of all ages as well as for elderly people with life-threatening illnesses, acceptability is an additive combination of the number of requests for PAS, the patient’s age, the amount of physical suffering, & the degree of curability of the illness, not only when judging for hypothetical patients, but also for their spouses & for themselves, making PAS acceptable even when the patient does not satisfy all the legal criteria. (7 refs)