More than 10 per cent of parents of children with terminal cancer who took part in a survey said they had considered hastening their child’s death, especially if the child was in pain.
Researchers from the Dana Farber Cancer Institute and Children’s Hospital in Boston interviewed 141 parents of children who had died of cancer between 1990 and 1999. In addition to discussing their own child’s life and death, the parents were asked to respond to a series of hypothetical vignettes portraying children with end-stage cancer.
The study, published in the March issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, used the Cochrane-Armitage test for trends to assess increasing consideration of hastening death (HD) across five pain categories (not at...
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