How We Die: Investigating the Ethics of Medical Aid in Dying

The Mudd Center for Ethics at Washington & Lee University will livestream here our February 11, 2025 event, How We Die: Investigating the Ethics of Medical Aid in Dying.

In Virginia, the Senate passed the Medical Aid in Dying (MAID) Act February 7, 2024, but two weeks later the House rejected it. This potential legislation represents a number of complex and embedded issues related to class, religion, race, and notions of justice. Often discussed in terms of a “good” death, MAID is held up as an ideal, but questions surround the practice:  

• What is a good death? 
• How does it happen? And for whom? 
• MAID is often associated with older individuals who may choose this option in the face of a terminal illness. What happens, however, when we consider children who are terminally ill or people with disabilities? 
• Who can act on another’s behalf especially in relation to assisted death? 

This issue of bodily autonomy touches on law, medicine, ethics, and faith. We will have the opportunity to listen to three perspectives on this issue and to think together about what it means in terms of medical ethics: autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice. 

• Terri Laws, Associate Professor, African and African American Studies, University of Michigan-Dearborn Public 
• Thaddeus Mason Pope, Professor of Law, Mitchell Hamline School of Law Fellow, The Hastings Center 
• Mara Buchbinder, Professor and Vice Chair of Social Medicine, Adjunct Professor of Anthropology, and Core Faculty in the Center for Bioethics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill