In 2008, Battin's husband became quadriplegic after a bicycle accident, which caused her to refine and augment her thinking about assisted suicide; he died in 2013 after he requested to turn off his life support.
[3] For the research she conducted, she was nominated as a candidate for the Spinoza Chair at the University of Amsterdam, a position she then held 1993.
[4] Outside of non-fiction writing, Battin occasionally published fiction pieces including short stories.
[6] Robeck, a short story published in Ending Life: Ethics and the way we die (2005), depicted family tensions over what would now be called preemptive suicide in old age.
The study found that the people who used assisted suicide in the US had more "comparative social, economic, educational, professional and other privileges" than those who were considered to be in vulnerable groups.
[c][5][14] Under cross-examination in Taylor's case, the Canadian government's attorney remarked to Battin that her husband's accident had "presented some pretty profoundly serious challenges to her thinking on the subject.” Battin replied that it had, “but only by provoking the ‘concerted re-re-rethinking’ that any self-respecting philosopher engages in,” and continued with a statement on her continuing commitment to two moral constructs in end-of-life decision-making: autonomy and mercy.
"[14] During the 2010s, Battin contacted Allyson Mower, and together with the Marriott Library, Oxford University Press, and a team of librarians, library staff, research assistants, and contractors they created an unprecedented publication format containing a massive compilation of discussion on historical sources of the ethics of suicide.
It focused on practices in different religious groups that raised issues of confidentiality, informed consent, truthtelling, and paternalism in fringe and mainline denominations.
[5] Battin met her second husband Brooke Hopkins at the University of Utah in 1975[21] when they were both newly appointed to teaching positions, and they bought a house together in 1976.
[21] Battin's situation was one of four case studies used for the book Epistemology, Ethics, and Meaning in Unusually Personal Scholarship.