Euthanasia efforts were revived during the 1960s and 1970s, under the right-to-die rubric, physician assisted death in liberal bioethics, and through advance directives and do not resuscitate orders.
Several major court cases advanced the legal rights of patients, or their guardians, to withdraw medical support with the expected outcome of death.
By 1990, barely a decade and a half after the New Jersey Supreme Court’s historic decision, patients were well aware that they could decline any form of medical therapy if they simply choose to do that either directly or by expressing their wish via appointed representative.
In a 2004 article in the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Brown University historian Jacob M. Appel documented extensive political debate over legislation to legalize physician-assisted suicide in both Iowa and Ohio in 1906.
[9] Canadian historian Ian Dowbiggin's 2003 book, A Merciful End, revealed the role that leading public figures, including Clarence Darrow and Jack London, played in advocating for the legalization of euthanasia.
In the 1983 case of Barber v. Superior Court, two physicians had honored a family's request to withdraw both respirator and intravenous feeding and hydration tubes from a comatose patient.
[10] The California End of Life Option Act from 2016 provides a procedure for assisted suicide of a terminally ill adult.
[12] In the United States legal and ethical debates about euthanasia became more prominent in the Karen Ann Quinlan case who went into a coma after allegedly mixing tranquilizers with alcohol, surviving biologically for 9 years in a "persistent vegetative state" even after the New Jersey Supreme Court approval to remove her from a respirator.
Under the law, in some situations, Texas hospitals and physicians have the right to withdraw life support measures, such as mechanical respiration, from terminally ill patients when such treatment is considered to be both futile and inappropriate.
Attempts to legalize euthanasia and assisted suicide resulted in ballot initiatives and legislation bills within the United States in the last 20 years.
A recent review studied surveys, interviews, and death certificates from 1947-2016 to gain insight into physician opinions on both physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia.
In other countries, these percentages were much higher - for example, 60% of Dutch physicians have prescribed medication for physician-assisted suicide; in the Netherlands and Belgium, over half of doctors reported patient requests for aid in dying.
[17] In various studies from the 1990s, previously surveyed religious groups reported that religiosity (i.e., self-evaluation and frequency of worship service attendance) correlated to opinions on euthanasia.
Individuals who attended church regularly and more frequently and considered themselves more religious were found to be more opposed to euthanasia than to those who had a lower level of religiosity.