Adrienne Asch, PhD
Yeshiva University
Recognizing Death While Affirming Life:
A Disability Perspective on End-of-Life Questions
Thursday, October 31, 2013
12 to 1 p.m.
SUNY Upstate Medical University Campus
Room 1507/1508 Setnor Academic Building, 766 Irving Ave, Syracuse
How can health care practitioners and bioethicists benefit from the views of disability scholars and activists?
This seminar takes a disability rights perspective on now-famous end of life cases and current debates about the end of life and assisted suicide.
Dr. Adrienne Asch is the Edward and Robin Milstein Professor of Bioethics and Director of the Center for Ethics at Yeshiva University and professor of epidemiology and population health and family and social medicine at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City.
Her work focuses on the ethical, political, psychological, and social implications of human reproduction and the family. She has authored numerous articles and book chapters and is the co-editor of Prenatal Testing and Disability Rights and The Double-Edged Helix: Social Implications of Genetics in a Diverse Society.
Co-sponsors: Syracuse University’s Disability Cultural Center & Renee Crown University Honors Program
Free and open to the public
Access:
The presentation space is wheelchair accessible (wheelchair-accessible bathroom on the same floor) ASL interpreter provided.
Information
For information, contact Consortium Coordinator Lois Dorschel at dorschel@upstate.edu or Executive Director Rebecca Garden, PhD, at gardenr@upstate.edu or 315-464-8451.
Consortium for Culture and Medicine Faculty Seminars The Consortium for Culture and Medicine is a collaboration among Le Moyne College, Syracuse University, and Upstate Medical University that brings together faculty and students from disparate fields to teach and conduct research on social, ethical, and cultural aspects of health care. The Consortium’s Seminar Series encourages faculty, students, and interested community members to speak across disciplinary boundaries on urgent topics that interweave discourses and professional and social perspectives. For more information, see: .
Location
The Setnor Academic Building is an extension on the north side of Weiskotten Hall, 766 Irving Ave., at the intersection of Waverly and Irving, on the west side of Irving, just north of Waverly. (See attached map.)
Parking
There is limited metered parking on Elizabeth Blackwell Street near University Hospital, and along Irving Avenue near Weiskotten and Silverman Halls and the Health Sciences Library. Visitors may wish to park at one of two public garages on Irving Avenue. (Take Adams Street to Irving Avenue. Turn right. The garages are on the left side of the street between Adams Street and Waverly Avenue.)
Planet of the Blind 
Oh ho-hum, Dr. Asch believes thus (the asterisks for emphasis are mine):
“(1) No one should be socially authorized to engage in
conduct that directly, purposefully, and unambiguously
inflicts death, whether on another person or on oneself.
(2) Decisions that indirectly lead to death should be
acted upon only after a consensus is reached among
many people. No single individual should be socially
authorized to exercise exclusive control over decisions that might lead to death, whether that individual is the dying person, the attending physician, or a family member acting as health care proxy.
(3) As much as possible, ***end of life care should not depend on explicit decisions made at the bedside of a specific dying person but rather should be implicitly dictated by systems-wide decisions about available resources, personnel, and institutional settings***—that is, by setting up default pathways that implicitly guide and even control
caretaking decisions in individual cases.”*
SK, it was bad enough when we had Big Brother messing with our lives, now we must contend with Big Sister, too. Sorry, person-centered care, puh-lease, from start-to-finish. And when one starts truly accepting this premise, then physician assisted suicide should be a carefully constructed option for the few people who wish to consider it. Check out Dignitas for a great example:
http://www.dignitas.ch/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=22&lang=en
*
http://www.thehastingscenter.org/uploadedFiles/Publications/Special_Reports/improving_eol_care_why_has_it_been_so_difficult.pdf
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