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Abstract

This article is about an end-of-life option that many people have not heard of: Voluntary Stopping Eating and Drinking (VSED). With VSED, a person deliberately ceases intake of food and fluid to hasten their death. VSED is a peaceful, pain-free end-of-life option chosen by an increasing number of individuals in their last chapter of life who are suffering from chronic, incurable, progressively debilitating diseases. While there is considerable scholarship on the lawfulness of VSED, there is confusion in the existing literature on whether VSED is suicide, and on the related question whether individuals who provide comfort and care to VSED patients are guilty of assisting suicide. This confusion creates uncertainty and hardship for patients, their loved ones, and health care professionals who need to know whether they incur criminal or civil liability or licensure discipline for providing care to VSED patients. This article is the first to address these issues with legal analysis. To do so, it has created a database of all suicide and assisted suicide statutes in the United States, conducted a systematic literature review of academic publications in multiple fields and eight countries over the past four decades that address legal issues of VSED, and compiled national data on suicide. To see the stories behind this data, this article turns to personal narratives of those who have considered or chosen suicide, and those who have chosen VSED. The issues addressed in this article are becoming more urgent as an increasing number of people seek end-of-life options to avoid living out their last years bedridden, diapered, unaware of who they are, with their fate controlled by medicine, technology and strangers.

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445

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489

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