Killing off the dying?

Public Interest, Spring, 1998 by Adam Wolfson

And why would he? A New England Journal of Medicine poll taken in 1994, when Kevorkian was just warming up, indicated that 66 percent of Michigan residents and 56 percent of its doctors favored the legalization of physician-assisted suicide. According to a 1997 survey - many Kevorkian-assisted deaths later - 68 percent of men and 59 percent of women polled in Michigan favored "the idea of allowing physician-assisted suicide for people who are physically suffering, or terminally ill, but mentally competent to request help in dying." As Peter Jennings on ABC's "WorldNews Tonight" observed this past fall, the political debate over Kevorkian is "a thing of the past." Obviously, Kevorkian is not the representative of some elitist campaign; if anything, Dr. Death is a folk-hero. "He has a warm, zany sense of humor," wrote one author in her comprehensive book on death in America. The man who would experiment on live patients before he puts them away, and who has reportedly already killed 70 to 100 people, is to the residents of Michigan just a doctor doing his job, it would seem.

The acceptance of what was once the gruesomely unacceptable in Michigan (and Oregon) is no fluke of local politics. That much is clear. Rather than anomalies these states are trendsetters. According to the Washington Post, 20 other states are currently considering right-to-die measures, and Michigan has already begun a petition drive to put a measure similar to Oregon's on the ballot. A recent Harris poll reported that 68 percent of Americans believe that terminally ill patients should be allowed to receive lethal doses of medication from their physician. Web sites promoting assisted death are many, and there are numerous right-to-die organizations throughout America, including Americans for Death with Dignity, Death With Dignity Education Center, Choice in Dying, Compassion in Dying, Euthanasia Research and Guidance Organization (ERGO!), and so forth and so on. The most famous of these groups is the Hemlock Society, which has some 75 chapters and 72,000 dues paying members in the United States. Its founder and director until recently, Derek Humphry, wrote the 1991 best seller Final Exit, which sold half a million copies and spent 18 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. It is perhaps the most widely read of the self-help books on assisted death, a burgeoning genre. Humphry describes in easy-to-follow lessons how to kill oneself, for example, "with barbiturate drugs ... plus a plastic bag to be quick and absolutely sure." "My personal choice," noted Humphry parenthetically.

The technology trap

The American people seem ready, if given the opportunity, to put in place some form of assisted death, as they have done de jure in Oregon and de facto in Michigan. The question is why? Conservatives frequently point to the abortion precedent. Once the American people became inured to over one million abortions per year, it was only a matter of time before they backed other forms of medical killing, creating what has become known as a "Culture of Death." The argument is not without merit: Liberals themselves frequently claim that the abortion right provides legal precedent for a right to physician-assisted suicide. However, there are more persuasive explanations for the popularity of assisted death, ones that have little to do with the politics of abortion.