Voluntarily Stopping Eating and Drinking: A Compassionate, Widely-Available Option for Hastening Death

Timothy E. Quill, MD is Professor of Medicine, Psychiatry, Medical Humanities and Nursing at the University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC). He was Past President of the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine, the Founding Director of the URMC Palliative Care Program, and the initial Director of the URMC Schyve Center for Biomedical Ethics. Dr. Quill is the author of "Death with Dignity: A Case of Individualized Decision Making" (1991) in the New England Journal of Medicine, and he was the lead physician plaintiff in the New York legal case challenging the law prohibiting physician-assisted death heard in 1997 by the U.S. Supreme Court (Quill v. Vacco). He is the author of 8 books and over 150 peer reviewed articles on various aspects of palliative care, hospice, primary care, medical ethics, and end-of-life policy.

Paul T. Menzel, PhD is Professor of Philosophy emeritus, Pacific Lutheran University. He has published widely on moral questions in health economics and health policy, including Strong Medicine: The Ethical Rationing of Health Care (OUP, 1990), and (as co-editor) Prevention vs. Treatment: What's the Right Balance? (OUP, 2011). He has been a visiting scholar at Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Rockefeller Center-Bellagio, Brocher Foundation, Chinese University of Hong Kong, and Monash University. He is a member of the Advisory Board of The Completed Life Initiative and serves on The Hastings Center's work group for its project on Dementia and the Ethics of Choosing When to Die.

Thaddeus M. Pope, JD, PhD, HEC-C is Professor of Law at Mitchell Hamline School of Law in Saint Paul, Minnesota. A foremost expert on medical law and clinical ethics, he maintains a special focus on patient rights and healthcare decision-making. Ranked among the Top 20 most cited health law scholars in the United States, Professor Pope has over 225 publications in leading medical journals, bioethics journals, and law reviews. He co-authors the definitive treatise The Right to Die: The Law of End-of-Life Decisionmaking (Wolters Kluwer, 2020), and he runs the Medical Futility Blog (with over four million page-views). Prior to joining academia, he practiced at Arnold & Porter and clerked on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.

Judith K. Schwarz, PhD, RN is the Clinical Director of End of Life Choices, New York. She has for many years provided end-of-life consultation to New Yorkers and callers from other states who seek information about options and choices that permit personal control of the circumstances and timing of death. In addition to publishing in nursing and ethics journals, she provides frequent lectures about end of life decision making to lay and professional audiences. Working with legal and palliative care colleagues, she developed the End of Life Choices New York Dementia Directive which has been completed by hundreds of New Yorkers.