QuoteProject
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.
Ezekiel Emanuel
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

This quote discusses the autonomy of patients in deciding to end medical interventions that prolong life.

Ezekiel Emanuel's quote emphasizes the existing constitutional rights of patients to refuse medical treatments that artificially prolong their lives. It argues that the ability to stop invasive medical interventions, such as respirators or antibiotics, offers patients sufficient autonomy without the need for physician-assisted suicide or euthanasia, ultimately highlighting the importance of personal choice in matters of life and death.

Themes

AutonomyPatientsMedical InterventionTechnologyEuthanasia

In practice

Example use cases

In a discussion about patient rights in a healthcare conference.

More from Ezekiel Emanuel

There's nothing to be gained, and much to be lost, in trying to bend every child to match a one-size-fits-all notion of what it means to be a boy or girl of a specific age. Better to set a few parameters and then go with the flow. Call it 'jazz parenting.'
Ezekiel EmanuelRead
We had a big controversy in the United States when there was a limited number of dialysis machines. In Seattle, they appointed what they called a 'God committee' to choose who should get it, and that committee was eventually abandoned. Society ended up paying the whole bill for dialysis instead of having people make those decisions.
Ezekiel EmanuelRead
As an academic, what do you have? You have the quality of your work and the integrity with which you do it.
Ezekiel EmanuelRead
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.
Ezekiel EmanuelRead
Our dad hugged us and kissed us so much that some friends and relatives complained that he was going to turn us into sissies or homosexuals. But my dad didn't care. Let them raise their kids in a reserved and reticent way. He grew up in Israel, and his boys were going to be hugged and kissed by their father and know they were loved.
Ezekiel EmanuelRead
Childhood vaccines are one of the great triumphs of modern medicine. Indeed, parents whose children are vaccinated no longer have to worry about their child's death or disability from whooping cough, polio, diphtheria, hepatitis, or a host of other infections.
Ezekiel EmanuelRead

Similar quotes

In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy.
Ivan IllichRead
The method of "postulating" what we want has many advantages; they are the same as the advantages of theft over honest toil.
Bertrand RussellRead
For Star Trek proves, as faulty as individual episodes could be, is that the much-maligned common man and common woman has an enormous hunger for brotherhood. They are ready for the twenty-third century now, and they are light-years ahead of their petty governments and their visionless leaders.
Gene RoddenberryRead
Perhaps that is part of the animals' role among us, to awaken humility, to turn our minds back to the mystery of things, and open our hearts to that most impractical of hopes in which all creation speaks as one.
Matthew ScullyRead
The internal effects of a mutable policy poisons the blessings of liberty itself.
James MadisonRead
It is not that the child lives in a world of imagination, but that the child within us survives and starts into life only at rare moments of recollection, which makes us believe, and it is not true, that, as children, we were imaginative?
Cesare PaveseRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.