End-of-Life Choices
On July 21, 2003, the Hemlock Society officially became End-of-Life Choices. The organization advocates for legislation to allow Americans to live with the freedom of choosing a dignified death, and also informs and educates the public about the right to die.
End-Of-Life Choices was founded as the Hemlock Society in 1980 by Derek Humphry, a journalist from England. In 1975 Humphry helped his wife take her own life to end the pain and suffering caused by her terminal bone cancer. Humphry recounted this incident in Jean's Way: A Love Story (New York: Harper and Row, 1978). The book launched his career in the voluntary euthanasia movement two years later.
In 1991 Humphry published Final Exit: The Practicalities of Self-Deliverance and Assisted Suicide for the Dying (Eugene, OR: The Hemlock Society). The suicide manual, which was on the New York Times bestseller list for eighteen weeks, gives explicit instructions on how to commit suicide. While Humphry insisted that his how-to book was written only to those who were terminally ill, and not those suffering from depression, some physicians were concerned about how the book would affect those suffering from depression. Dr. Sherwin B. Nuland felt that depression was not a strong enough justification for teaching people how to kill themselves, to help them do it, or to bestow blessing on it (How We Die, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994). In his opinion, no one with judgment impaired by depression is in a position to make a critical decision about ending his or her life.
In October 1991, while Final Exit was selling out at bookstores, Humphry's second wife, Ann Wickett, whom he had divorced the year before, committed suicide. She had been diagnosed with cancer and was reportedly depressed.
Humphry retired from the Hemlock Society in 1992, but his more recent activities have also sparked controversy. In 1999 he recorded a video depicting a variety of methods for committing suicide. Though it had been available from the Hemlock Society USA for several months, the video drew even more criticism when it aired on public television in Oregon a number of times in 2000. Critics asserted that this airing provided dangerous information, particularly to people who were depressed or mentally ill and to children.
In 2004 Humphry published The Good Euthanasia Guide 2005: Where, What, and Who in Choices in Dying. Much of the book describes international suicide laws.
Dr. Jack Kevorkian
Dr. Jack Kevorkian first earned the nickname "Dr. Death" when, as a medical resident, he would photograph patients at the time of death to gather data that would help him differentiate death from coma, shock, and fainting. During his study and residency, he suggested unconventional ideas, such as the harvesting of organs from death row inmates. His career as a doctor was also "checkered" (Kevorkian's own word) and notable for controversy.
In the late 1980s Kevorkian retired from pathology work and pursued an interest in the concept of physician-assisted suicide, becoming one of its best-known and most passionate advocates. He constructed a machine that would allow a patient to press a red button and self-administer a lethal dose of poisonous potassium chloride, along with thiopental, a painkiller. With the use of this device, Kevorkian claims to have assisted in more than 130 suicides.
The first patient to commit suicide with Kevorkian's assistance and his suicide device, called Mercitron, was Janet Adkins. Adkins, a Hemlock Society member, sought Kevorkian's aid because she did not want to wait until she lost her cognitive abilities to Alzheimer's disease. In June 1990 Adkins committed suicide in Kevorkian's van in a public campground.
In 1991 Kevorkian assisted in the deaths of two Michigan women on the same day. Sherry Miller, age forty-three, had multiple sclerosis; Marjorie Wantz, age fifty-eight, complained of a painful pelvic disease. Neither one was terminally ill, but court findings showed that they both suffered from depression. In 1996 Dr. Kevorkian was tried for the assisted deaths of Miller and Wantz under the common law that considers assisted suicide illegal. He was acquitted.
Kevorkian continued to draw media attention with increasingly controversial actions. In February 1998 twenty-one-year-old Roosevelt Dawson, a paralyzed university student, became the youngest person to commit suicide with Kevorkian's help. In June 1998 Kevorkian announced that he was donating kidneys from Joseph Tushkowski, a quadriplegic whose death he had assisted. His actions were denounced by transplant program leaders, medical ethicists, and most of the public. The organs were refused by all medical centers and transplant teams.
In October 1998 Kevorkian euthanized fifty-two-year-old Thomas Youk, a man afflicted with Lou Gehrig's disease, at the patient's request. Dr. Kevorkian videotaped the death and gave the video to the CBS television show 60 Minutes for broadcast. The death was televised nationwide in November 1998 during primetime and included an interview with Kevorkian. He taunted Oakland County, Michigan, prosecutors to file charges against him. They did, and Kevorkian was convicted of second-degree murder in March 1999. On April 13, 1999, the seventy-year-old retired pathologist was sentenced to ten to twenty-five years in prison. While in prison, Kevorkian has staged three hunger strikes and has been subjected to force-feeding by prison officials. As of February 2006, Kevorkian remained in prison. He will be eligible for parole in May 2007 but told the Daily Oakland Press in 2004 that he expects to die in prison.
User Comments Add a comment…