BIGSTOCK
free to download from the website of Springer, the publisher of many medical journals.
Euthanasia, though legal in Belgium, is opposed by some healthcare professionals. This collection of essays contains insights and thought-provoking stories from the authors’ professional experience.
The authors are ten Belgian health care professionals, nurses, university professors and doctors specializing in palliative care and ethicists who fear that euthanasia has become normalised and trivial.
Far from being polemical, the perspectives in this book present another side to the narrative of patient autonomy. As Margaret Somerville, an Australian bioethicist and Wes Ely, an American critical care specialist, observe in their forward, there is a dearth of literature about the societal ramifications of legalising euthanasia. They write that: “The case against euthanasia is much more difficult to promote, not because it is weak it is not but because it is much more complex. This cas