A look at euthanasia, assisted death
By The Associated Press Thu Dec 21, 2:32 PM ET
A look at legislation covering euthanasia and assisted suicide in the industrialized world:
ITALY — Euthanasia is illegal in the heavily Roman Catholic nation. Assisted suicide can carry a sentence of up to 15 years in prison.
NETHERLANDS — Euthanasia was legalized in 2001, but the practice was common for at least a decade before that. Under the law, patients must be terminally ill, in unbearable pain and two doctors must agree there is no prospect for recovery.
BELGIUM — Legalized euthanasia under similar conditions as the Netherlands in 2002.
SWITZERLAND — Allows passive assistance to terminally ill people who have expressed a wish to die.
BRITAIN — Passed a law in 2004 allowing living wills or documents that set out what medical treatment patients want if they become seriously ill and lose the capacity to make a decision. In May, the House of Lords rejected legislation that would have allowed doctors to prescribe lethal drug doses to terminally ill patients.
FRANCE — Enables the terminally ill or those with no hope of recovery to refuse treatment in favor of death. Doctors are allowed to administer painkillers, even if their secondary effects include shortening patients' lives. But the law stops short of allowing euthanasia.
SPAIN — Euthanasia is illegal in Spain and people who help someone else die can be punished with at least six months in prison. But Spain's Socialist government wants to legalize it as part of a wave of liberal reforms that have largely transformed this traditionally Roman Catholic country.
UNITED STATES — U.S. law generally permits patients to ask that medical treatment be withheld or withdrawn, even if it raises their risk of dying. Voters in Oregon went further and approved the first physician-assisted suicide law in the U.S. in 1994, but it is now under legal challenge.
AUSTRALIA — Australia's Northern Territory province legalized mercy killing in 1996 and pro-euthanasia physician Dr. Philip Nitschke helped four people die before federal lawmakers overturned the provincial legislation.
OTHER — The U.N. Human Rights Committee criticized Dutch legalization in 2001. The Council of Europe — Europe's top human rights body — rejected euthanasia as a legitimate means to end life in April 2005.