Paper short abstract:

The right to die is often seen as a reaction against the medicalization of death, but it is also simultaneously part of medicalization processes. By examining how right to die advocates navigate this contradiction, this paper will show how they argue for a particular kind of "natural" death.

Paper long abstract:

Assisted dying - the medical hastening of death - as a prominent political concern is considered to emerge as a reaction against medical technologies that have the ability to prolong life and is seen to be part of the larger death awareness and hospice movement of the 1970s. However, rather than a response to emerging medical dominance over all spheres of life, the right to die is also an example of this process. While right to die advocates often contrast a protracted hospital death hooked to machines with a swift and merciful assisted death in the comfort of one's home, the two are products of the same medical logic that seeks to master and control the dying process. In that sense, right to die activists explicitly argue against a "biotechnical embrace" of the dying process even when the right to die as a medico-legal concern places the dying process as an object of medical and legal regulation and public policy. In other words, the right to die is as much an example as the medicalization of death as it is a reaction against it, an example of what Shai Lavi terms the "modern art of dying." At the same time, right to die activists are cognisant of these contradictions and paradoxically argue that the only way to ensure a more "natural" death is through access to medically assisted death. This paper will analyze how right to die advocates understand these particularly "modern" deaths as simultaneously "natural" ones.