Medical school education and post graduate education emphasize thoroughness.

I'm the son of a pediatrician, and I do believe that the most important resource we have is our kids. And I think the most important thing for America's future is to invest more in our children.

Patients who are being kept alive by technology and want to end their lives already have a recognized constitutional right to stop any and all medical interventions, from respirators to antibiotics. They do not need physician-assisted suicide or euthanasia.

I am not sure precisely why we need to have privacy, but everyone knows for sure that we need to relax and not have to put on our social, outwardly looking face all of the time.

We don't have enough solid organs for transplantation; not enough kidneys, livers, hearts, lungs. When you get a liver and you have three people who need it, who should get it? We tried to come up with an ethically defensible answer. Because we have to choose.

The situation around Terri Schiavo was a deeply held conflict over what to do if someone isn't going to return to consciousness or competence. Who will decide? Even there, where we had settled legal rules, we still had disagreement. We're torn about these things.

Americans tend to endorse the use of physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia when the question is abstract and hypothetical.