 The flowering of bioethics as an academic discipline and branch of philosophy was fed by religious, moral and ethical concerns raised by high profile legal cases about the right to die (Beauchamp 2000). These cases seemed to place the power to “play God”—make life and death decisions—in the hands of patients, families and physicians. The field was influenced, for example, by the famous Karen Quinlan decision (In the Matter of Quinlan, 1976). This case transported the federal constitutional ideal of the right to decisional privacy into state law, and characterized the right of a comatose woman’s family to refuse life-saving treatment on her behalf as a “right to privacy” (Jonsen 1998). After the Quinlan decision, hospitals began setting up ethics committees to help doctors, patients and families exercise decisional privacy rights in a lawful and responsible manner. In 1986, the U.S. Supreme Court recognized in the case of Nancy Cruzan a right of patients to refuse medical care such as artificial respiration and tube feeding, where the wishes of the patient to die could be established by clear and convincing evidence.