Abstract
Amonth before the 2012 general election, prospects looked good for Question 2, the “Death with Dignity” initiative on the Massachusetts ballot. It would have legalized physician-assisted suicide, making Massachusetts the fourth state to do so. Like similar provisions that had passed in Oregon in 1998 and Washington in 2008, Question 2 contained safeguards against coercion and premature decisions. It required that the patient’s life expectancy be six months or less, that he or she be mentally competent, and that two witnesses and two physicians approve the request.1 Public opinion polls taken a month before the election showed that 65 percent of voters approved the bill.2 Poll results suggested widespread acceptance of views like those of the Death with Dignity National Center: “The greatest human freedom is to live, and die, according to one’s own desires and beliefs. From advance directives to physician-assisted dying, death with dignity is a movement to provide options for the dying to control their own end-of-life care.”3
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Lisa Wangsness, “O’Malley Lauds Defeat of Doctor-Assisted Suicide Bill,” Boston Globe, November 12, 2012, http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2012/11/12/cardinal-malley-church-and-its-allies-stopped-terrible-assault-doctor-assisted-suicide-bill/GabOmgIqwBZvdtBP571SAL/story.html, accessed November 30, 2012; Wangsness, “Coalition.”
Ezekiel J. Emanuel, “Four Myths about Doctor-Assisted Suicide,” New York Times, October 27, 2012, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/27/four-myths-about-doctor-assisted-suicide/?_r=0, accessed November 29, 2012.
Ben Mattlin, “Suicide by Choice? Not So Fast,” New York Times, October 31, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/01/opinion/suicide-by-choice-not-so-fast.html?_r=0, accessed November 9, 2012.
Diana Pearce, “Women, Work, and Welfare: The Feminization of Poverty,” in Working Women and Families, edited by Karen Wolk Feinstein (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1979), 103–24; see also Megan Thibos et al., “The Feminization of Poverty,” J. McDon ald Williams Institute, 2007, http://www.dallasindicators.org/Portals/8/Reports/Reports _Internal/Feminization%20of%20Poverty.pdf, accessed October 28, 2009.
Linda Gordon, “Why Nineteenth-Century Feminists Did Not Support Birth Control and Twentieth-Century Feminists Do: Feminism, Reproduction, and the Family,” in Rethinking the Family: Some Feminist Questions, ed. Barrie Thorne and Marilyn Yalom (New York: Longman, 1982), 40–53.
Judith A. Baer, Our Lives before the Law: Constructing a Feminist Jurisprudence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), chap. 6;
Mary Krane Derr, “Prolife Feminism,” in A Historical and Multicultural Encyclopedia of Female Reproductive Rights in the United States, ed. Judith Baer (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2002), 172–74;
Sheila Jeffreys, Anti-Climax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution (New York: New York University Press, 1990).
Margaret Mead and Frances Kaplan, eds., American Women: The Report of the President’s Commission on the Status of Women (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1963), 45–59, 128–35, 147–51.
Judith Baer, “Compromising Rights: How Does a Constitution Mean?” Newsletter on Philosophy and Law, February 2005.
In fact, I didn’t invent any of these. See Katha Pollitt, “The Strange Case of Baby M,” The Nation, January 1, 1998, http://www.thenation.com/article/strange-case-baby-m#axzz2Znot5H4D, accessed November 11, 2012; Patrick Kermit, “Cochlear Implants, Linguistic Rights, and ‘Open Future’ Arguments” (paper presented at the 9th World Congress of Bioethics, Rijeka, Croatia, September 3–8, 2009);
Andrew M. Greeley, “Black and White Minstrels,” The Reporter 21 (1968): 98–100;
John Kotre, The Best of Times, The Worst of Times: Andrew Greeley and American Catholicism, 1950–1975 (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1978), 131 (priests’ celibacy).
247 U.S. 251 (1923); Stephen B. Wood, Constitutional Politics in the Progressive Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 97.
Leonard F. James, ed., The Supreme Court in American Life, 2nd ed. (Glencoe, IL: Scott Foresman, 1971), 74.
261 U.S. 525 (1923); Thomas I. Parkinson, “Minimum Wage and the Constitution,” American Labor Legislation Review 13 (June 1923): 131–36.
See Chapter 5; Baer ed., Encyclopedia, xxi–xxii; Judith Baer, Women in American Law, 3rd ed. (New York: Holmes and Meier, 2002), 180–84; Lara Foley, “Eugenics,” in Encyclopedia, 77–78.
John Hart Ely, “The Wages of Crying Wolf: A Comment on Roe v. Wade,” Yale Law Journal 82 (1973): 920–49; emphasis supplied.
See, for example, Simi Linton, My Body Politic (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006).
Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), chap. 2.
Jason DeParle, “Beyond the Legal Right: Why Liberals and Feminists Don’t Like to Talk about the Morality of Abortion,” Washington Monthly, April 1, 1989, 42.
Marianne Bitler and Madeline Zavodny, “Did Abortion Legalization Reduce the Number of Unwanted Children? Evidence from Adoptions,” Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health 34 (2002): 25–33.
Susan Crabtree, “Rangel to Reintroduce Military Draft Measure,” The Hill, January 13, 2009.
See Georg Spielthenner, “A Logical Analysis of Slippery Slope Arguments,” Health Care Analysis 18 (2010): 148–63.
Judith Thomson, “A Defense of Abortion,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 1 (1971): 47–66;
Eileen McDonagh, Breaking the Abortion Deadlock (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996);
Judith Baer, “What We Know as Women: A New Look at Roe v. Wade,” NWSA Journal 2 (1990): 558–82; Baer, Our Lives before the Law, 558–82.
Catharine MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 94.
See A. B. Jotkowitz and S. Glick, “The Groningen Protocol: Another Perspective,” Journal of Medical Ethics 32 (2006): 157–58;
Alexander A. Kon, “Neonational Euthanasia Is Unsupportable: The Groningen Protocol Should Be Abandoned,” Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 28 (2007): 453–63;
Alexander A. Kon, “We Cannot Accurately Predict the Extent of an Infant’s Future Suffering: The Groningen Protocol Is Too Dangerous to Support,” The American Journal of Bioethics 8, no. 11 (2008): 27–29;
Penney Lewis, “The Empirical Slippery Slope from Voluntary to Non-Voluntary Euthanasia,” Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics 35 (2007): 197–210;
Bertha Manninen, “A Case for Justified Non-Voluntary Active Euthanasia: Exploring the Ethics of the Groningen Protocol,” Journal of Medicine and Ethics 32, no. 11 (2006): 643–51, and “Revisiting Justified Nonvoluntary Euthanasia,” The American Journal of Bioethics 8, no. 11 (2008): 33–35;
Eduard Verhagen et al., “The Groningen Protocol—Euthanasia in Severely Ill Newborns,” The New England Journal of Medicine 352 (2005): 959–62;
Wesley J. Smith, Forced Exit: The Slippery Slope from Assisted Suicide to Legalized Murder (New York: Times Books, 1997).
Copyright information
© 2013 Judith A. Baer
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Baer, J.A. (2013). An Introduction to Ironic Freedom. In: Ironic Freedom. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137031006_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137031006_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-44066-5
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-03100-6
eBook Packages: Palgrave Social Sciences CollectionSocial Sciences (R0)