l forms, about their own care (Gostin, 1992; Pellegrino, 1992).
By no means did the Quinlan case dispose of the issue of euthanasia, passive or otherwise. In 1978, Pope John Paul II said that euthanasia would be the great moral issue of the 1980s; it also turned out to be a major legal issue (Humphry & Wickett, 1986). In the years after the Quinlans first entered the New Jersey judicial system, with each succeeding and troubling case, a host of end-of-life issues became an increasingly prominent subject of moral, professional, and public-policy debate, and the names in the cases a prominently bleak aspect of the culture: Karen Ann Quinlan, Nancy Cruzan, Baby Doe, Jack Kevorkian. In the late 1980s, Nancy Cruzan's parents' wish to withdraw her life support was opposed by the state of Missouri but finally granted by the U.S. Supreme Court.
The annual rate of so-called mercy-killings rose tenfold from 1920 to 1985. Between 1975 and 1985, murder-suicides, double suicides, and assisted suicides of the terminally ill "increased forty times as desperate elderly people felt obliged to take the law and fate into their own hands" (Humphry & Wickett, 1986, p. xi).
Under the general category of euthanasia fall a number of discrete end-of-life terms, which are sometimes used interchangeably, but which hardly carry a uniform meaning in the literature. Where more precise definitions are given, term meanings may vary with the definers' professional discipline. Euthanasia, derived from the Greek combining forms eu meaning good and thanatos meaning death, has historically been identified with the mercy killing of hopelessly sick human beings and animals. In a 1994 report by the American Medical Association's Council on Ethical and Judicial affairs, euthanasia is identified with a situation in which a physician administers to a patient some means of death, such as "the death-causing drug or other agent" (Glasson, 1994, p. 91). The AMA's definition...