New Euthanasia ProCon.org Website Brings Hundreds of Key Euthanasia Opponents and Proponents Together

Euthanasia, PAS, and end-of-life controversies debated for public benefit in pro-con format.

Santa Monica, California (PRWEB) January 10, 2007 --ProCon.org launched its newest website, Euthanasia ProCon.org (www.euthanasiaprocon.org), today to impact the public debate over euthanasia, physician-assisted suicide (PAS), and other end-of-life controversies.

Euthanasia ProCon.org cites position statements from Dr. Henry Aaron to Dr. Marjorie Zucker and about 200 others in between including the Schiavo family, Jack Kevorkian, the American Medical Association, the ACLU, and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops among many others.

When these difficult Cases occur, they are difficult chiefly because while we have them under Consideration all the Reasons pro and con are not present to the Mind at the same time... To get over this, my Way is, to divide half a Sheet of Paper by a Line into two Columns, writing over the one Pro, and over the other Con...

Some featured content areas include:

· Timeline of euthanasia from Ancient Greece to the 2006 Gonzalez v. Oregon Supreme Court decision

· Case summaries of landmark decisions involving euthanasia and PAS such as In re Quinlan (1976), Washington v. Glucksberg (1997), and People v. Kevorkian (2001)

· Guide to state laws on assisted suicide featuring all 50 states and the District of Columbia

· Surveys of medical professionals and public polls on euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide

Managing Editor, Kamy Akhavan, commented on the project:

"The idea for this website emerged while our staff experienced the emotional, ethical, and ultimately political ordeal surrounding Terri Schiavo's end-of-life issues. The idea gained momentum as many of our readers urged us to tackle the subject after their reported frustration with biased and/or untrustworthy sources.

We felt that complex issues such as living wills and advanced directives, religious concerns, whether a right to die exists, who if anyone decides when death is best for a family member, and dozens of others, would take the average person months of time to sort out.

We finally decided to invest hundreds of research hours and thousands of dollars to exploring those issues and condensing them into a simple, pro-con format so that the average reader could spend minutes not months deciding for him or herself whether euthanasia should be legal."

The pro-con format was a favorite of Founding Father Benjamin Franklin who stated in 1772:

"When these difficult Cases occur, they are difficult chiefly because while we have them under Consideration all the Reasons pro and con are not present to the Mind at the same time... To get over this, my Way is, to divide half a Sheet of Paper by a Line into two Columns, writing over the one Pro, and over the other Con..."

ProCon.org has taken this historic principle and applied it to today's controversies via the Internet. Our two-column, pro-con presentations are accessible to students, policy makers, judges, media, politicians, academics, scientists, and the general public within moments of their publication.

For more information visit www.euthanasiaprocon.org or contact the Managing Editor.

About ProCon.org
ProCon.org is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit public benefit corporation that has no government affiliations of any kind.

ProCon.org's purpose is educational, and it does not express opinions on its research projects. Instead, ProCon.org researches issues that are complicated and important and works to present them in a balanced, comprehensive and straight forward pro-con format.

The organization formed in 2004, and has since brought its unique pro-con perspective to a variety of controversial issues including medical marijuana, the war in Iraq, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, electronic voting machines, the ACLU, the origins of sexual orientation, the phrase "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, and others.

For more about ProCon.org visit: http://www.procon.org/aboutus.htm

Contact:
Kamy Akhavan (kamy @ procon.org)
Managing Editor, ProCon.org
www.procon.org
233 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 200
Santa Monica, CA 90401
Tel: 310-587-1407
Fax: 310-393-2471

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