Last Rights: Facing End-of-Life Choices focuses on end-of-life care and asks what is the most humane way to care for patients in their final days? How does the treatment patients receive affect them and their families? What about those patients who believe it is an individual right to hasten their own death? Would their numbers be reduced if their care were markedly improved? Should death with dignity (help to die) be legally sanctioned? This documentary looks at the rare call for hastened death as well as the impact on dying individuals of accessible, appropriate, and compassionate medical care.
Raising awareness of the complexity of end-of-life care and respect for individual choices, Last Rights: Facing End-of-Life Choices encourages conversations: honoring the sanctity of life while assuring ethical and moral treatment of the dying; the ability of medical technology to keep a patient alive while life is ebbing; individual rights versus society’s mandate to preserve life; and the importance of family, the role of physicians, and the value of honest communications.
