Several major court cases advanced the legal rights of patients, or their guardians, to practice at least voluntary passive euthanasia ( physician assisted death ).
12.
The Roman Catholic church, which opposes medically assisted suicide, also indicated support for some kind of passive euthanasia, or removing life support to allow a natural death.
13.
The term " right to die " has been interpreted in a number of ways, including issues of suicide, passive euthanasia, active euthanasia, assisted suicide, and physician-assisted suicide.
14.
Various countries, such as Germany and Spain, turn a blind eye to " passive euthanasia " for example by pulling the plug on people in a permanent coma.
15.
Official statistics are scarce but bioethicist Horacio Garc�a Romero claims that up to 45 % of the terminally-ill patients in the country demand some form of passive euthanasia.
16.
Patients retain the rights to refuse medical treatment and to receive appropriate management of pain at their request ( passive euthanasia ), even if the patients'choices hasten their deaths.
17.
If withholding treatment meant passive euthanasia for a patient near death, he wrote, then the patient might as well be killed by lethal injection or some other painless form of active euthanasia.
18.
Many doctors in France, after consulting with families, are known to discretely stop treatment for some patients in extreme suffering and with no hope of being cured, a form of " passive euthanasia.
19.
Hayden said he could see no difference between passive euthanasia, in which nothing was done to prevent a person's death, and active euthanasia which involved taking action to meet a dying person's wishes.
20.
Many doctors in France, after consulting with families, are known to discretely stop treatment for some patients in extreme suffering and with no hope of being cured, a form of " passive euthanasia ."
