Mudd Lecture Series to Examine the Ethics of Medical Aid in Dying A panel of experts will give lectures on Feb. 11 at 4 p.m. in Stackhouse Theater.

By Emily Innes
February 5, 2025

Washington and Lee University’s Mudd Center for Ethics presents a panel discussion investigating the ethics of medical aid in dying on Feb. 11 at 4 p.m. in Stackhouse Theater in Elrod Commons.

The panel, which is free and open to the public, is part of the Mudd Center’s series on “How We Live & Die.” The event will also be streamed online at https://go.wlu.edu/livestream.

Moderated by Kerry Egan ’95, hospice chaplain and author, the panel will feature Terri Laws, associate professor of African and African American studies at the University of Michigan, Dearborn; Thaddeus Mason Pope, professor of law at the Mitchell Hamline School of Law; and Mara Buchbinder, professor and vice chair of social medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

“Medical Aid in Dying (MAiD) allows a terminally ill patient access to lethal medication that can be self-administered to hasten a patient’s death,” explained Melissa Kerin, the director of the Mudd Center. “Some see MAiD as a ‘good death’ in that it is a humane way to avoid unnecessary suffering, and others see it as a dangerous intervention that has the risk of being abused, endangering vulnerable groups of people. There is no easy answer when it comes to MAiD, but at least this panel will give us three well-informed perspectives to help us think through the deep ethical issues.”

At the Feb. 11 event, each panelist will share insights related to the legislation, application, and/or implication of MAiD. Following the first hour of presentations, there will be a discussion moderated by Egan. Egan is a hospice chaplain and the author of “On Living,” a New York Times best-selling book of essays about how people in the midst of the dying process make meaning of their lives. A graduate of W&L and Harvard Divinity School, Egan was a writer-in-residence at the Aspen Institute’s AspenWords program and a Hannah Judy Gretz Fellow at the Ragdale Foundation. She has been a keynote speaker at dozens of hospices, hospitals, conferences, churches and universities, including W&L’s 2019 Baccalaureate Service.

The Panelists

The panel will begin with Thaddeus Pope, whose talk, “Medical Aid in Dying: Expanding Access to Clinician Assisted Death,” will examine how Pope uses state and federal law to achieve value-concordant care, ensuring that people will get the healthcare they want and avoid healthcare they do not. Pope is a Hastings Center Fellow and a former Fulbright Scholar and Brocher Foundation Researcher. He has been a regular consultant to the American Clinicians Academy on Medical Aid in Dying, an advisor to other end-of-life advocacy organizations, a frequent testifier in legislative hearings on MAiD, and an expert witness in litigation concerning assisted dying. Prior to joining academia, Pope practiced at Arnold & Porter and clerked on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. He received his Ph.D. and J.D. from Georgetown University.

Pope’s talk will be followed by Mara Buchbinder, a core faculty member in the UNC Center for Bioethics and a medical anthropologist with broad interests in cultures of health, illness and medicine in the United States. In her remarks, titled “Stories of Assisted Dying in America: New Narratives for Old Debates,” she will discuss how her anthropological research on the implementation of Vermont’s 2013 Patient Choice and Control at End of Life Act has helped her to rethink some of the dominant public and media narratives about medically assisted death. This research on Vermont’s act is also the basis for Buchbinder’s recent book, “Scripting Death: Stories of Assisted Dying in America,” which illustrates how individuals have been navigating MAiD as a new medical frontier and explains how medical aid-in-dying works, what motivates people to pursue it, and ultimately, why upholding the “right to die” is very different from ensuring access to this life-ending procedure.

Terri Laws will deliver the last lecture titled “African Americans, Religion, and the Legalization of Death with Dignity,” exploring the influence of race and religion as key factors contributing to disproportionately few Black requests for MAiD as an end-of-life choice. Laws is a second-career academic, coming to the field after nearly two decades of administrative service in government, a pediatric academic medical center and a national workforce development nonprofit. Her work experience inspired an academic interest in the systemic experiences of marginalized social and cultural groups and how cultural norms and values are embedded within institutional systems. Laws received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Cincinnati, her Master of Divinity from the Morehouse School of Religion at the Interdenominational Theological Center, and her Ph.D. in religion from Rice University. She also completed a bioethics training and research fellowship at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.

For more information and a complete schedule of events, visit the series webpage.

The Mudd Center was established in 2010 through a gift to the university from award-winning journalist Roger Mudd, a 1950 graduate of W&L. By facilitating collaboration across traditional institutional boundaries, the center aims to encourage a multidisciplinary perspective on ethics informed by both theory and practice. Previous Mudd Center lecture series topics have included Global Ethics in the 21st Century, Race and Justice in America, The Ethics of Citizenship, Markets and Morals, Equality and Difference, The Ethics of Identity, The Ethics of Technology, Daily Ethics and Beneficence, and the Ethics of Design.