The Right to Die Debate: The Demonization of Dr. Kevorkian and the Creation of a Moral Panic Surrounding Physician-Assisted Suicide in the United States

The Right to Die Debate is a recent but highly controversial moral matter. In particular, physician-assisted suicide (PAS) is an issue that has been evaded by the medical community for years. As of 1990, most states had never encountered the issue before and therefore did not have any laws in place to prohibit PAS (Strate et. al, 2005). Dr. Jack Kevorkian, a retired pathologist from Royal Oak Michigan was the first to publicly address PAS. He brought the issue into the limelight through a bizarre and crude series of assisted deaths that had a lasting impact on not only the Right to Die Debate as whole, but on public policy and both federal and state governmental agendas. This study focuses on the way in which the media, in particular the New York Times (NYT) has portrayed Dr. Jack Kevorkian as incompetent, morally culpable and in an overall negative light in the past twenty years. Applying Stanley Cohen’s 1972 theory of moral panic, a content analysis of NYT media publications between 1990 and 1999 supports Cohen’s theory and reveals that the media has created a moral panic surrounding Kevorkian. This has in turn led to public policy that prevents both terminally ill individuals and their doctors from having a desirable choice; that of voluntary euthanasia and PAS.

Perpetual Conflict or Compromise? The Cost of Domestic Legitimacy in the Realm of Women's Human Rights: A Case Study on the Right to an Abortion

With its turbulent and volatile legal evolution, the right to an abortion in the United States still remains a highly contested issue and has developed into one of the most divisive topics within modern legal discourse. By deconstructing the political underpinnings and legal rationale of the right to an abortion through a systematic case law analysis, I will demonstrate that this right has been incrementally destabilized. This instability embedded in abortion jurisprudence has been primarily produced by a combination of textual ambiguity in the case law and judicial ambivalence regarding this complex area of law. In addition, I argue that the use of the largely discredited substantive due process doctrine to ground this contentious right has also contributed to the lack of legal stability. I assert that when these elements culminate in the realm of reproductive privacy the right to terminate a pregnancy becomes increasingly unstable and contested.

Evaluation of the March of Dimes Family Support Program with Focus on Parent to Parent Support

The March of Dimes NICU Family Support Program provides families with support specialists, educational materials, and community resources to aide in the emotional and physical adaptation to a new life with a premature infant. Parent-to-parent support has been shown to more effective than group support because the new NICU parent is able to connect on a more personal level with an experienced NICU parent. The purpose of the research was to develop and implement an evaluation instrument to assess the effectiveness of the March of Dimes NICU Family Support Program (MODFSP) in the NICU at the UConn Health Center, specifically parent-to-parent support. Steps involved in the process included determining areas of focus for the instrument, developing items based on MODFSP materials and literature review, piloting the materials on parents with infants in the NICU (with IRB approval), and utilizing descriptive statistics through SPSS Version 14 to assess the results from the instrument content. Qualitative items were also included in the evaluation, and descriptive qualitative methods, as appropriate, were used to analyze those items. The findings have supported the literature in that all parents that participated in parent to parent support agreed the program was beneficial in assisting them with their transition to life with a premature infant. In addition to evaluating the new NICU parent’s opinions of the program, researchers evaluated the staff and volunteer parents that were involved in the program. The results also revealed that the new NICU parent’s fear, anxiety, and stress decreased after the parent-to-parent interactions. The preliminary results were encouraging that the MODFSP has implemented an effective parent-to-parent support program to support parents through their time of crisis.