Billions of people will die before this century is out and, if you're old enough to read this, chances are you'll be one of them.
It's a brutal truth and not something we like to talk about, but many people will be talking about it this week when more than 300 doctors, lawyers, ethicists and carers from 29 countries meet in Brisbane to discuss the ethics and global practices and policies that affect the end of life.
The International End of Life Conference: Law, Ethics, Policy and Practice (13-15 August) opens at 5.15pm on Wednesday with a debate between Peter Singer and Charles Camosy on the ethics of euthanasia at QUT Gardens Point Campus, and the conference continues at the Mercure Hotel in Brisbane on 14 and 15 August.
It will tackle the thorniest ethical and practical questions facing all societies when life is coming to an end, says the conference's host, QUT's Australian Centre for Health Law Research director Professor Ben White.
"Redefining death for the purpose of organ donation, the ethics of keeping someone alive for the purposes of harvesting their organs and of giving dying donors drugs that won't help them but improve the quality of their organs are some issues the conference will cover," Professor White said.
"This conference is a unique chance to bring health law scholars, ICU specialists, bioethicists, legal and health practitioners, and health law and bioethics institutions to have the conversations on death and dying the world has to have as we live longer and technology capable of prolonging life is racing ahead."
Presenters at the conference will canvass such questions as:
- Voluntary stopping of eating and drinking as a means to end intractable suffering
- Should we commence life-support measures for the sole purpose of organ donation?
- Has the definition of death been gerrymandered for the purposes of organ donation?
- Existential suffering, action failure and medically assisted dying
- Organ donation in Settler Society: Law's role in why Indigenous People languish on waiting lists
- Legal issues on organ procurement in China
- Patients near death: an Israeli study
A full program is available here.
Media contact: Niki Widdowson, QUT media, +61 7 3138 2999 or n.widdowson@qut.edu.au
