법률ㆍ가이드라인ㆍ의료

Statutes and Guidelines: On the Present Legal Stage of Terminal Care in Japan

The Japanese society has considered terminal care fundamentally as a medical matter, which should be settled among a patient, his/her family and medical staffs. Criminal justice has also been reluctant to intervene there as a bed-side medical case. Certainly, there should be transparency or visibility of terminal care and a patient's right there must be protected. But these problems can be solved by some guidelines and we legislation is not necessary. These situations are contrasting with the American society which starts from the Karen Ann Quinlan case (1976) and the California Natural Death Act (1976), and has moved forward hard and hard. I thought the situations in Korean are similar to the Japanese and negative attitude concerning legalization is also dominant there. However, an excellent article by Cho Sung-Yung has told us that Korean people are discussing legislation of terminal care law, and that the two legal cases (a criminal case and a treatment injunction case) were turning points. We should understand terminal care issue against the background of each society: culture, jurisprudence, medicine, and economics.