Tens of thousands of people try suicide every year in many horrible ways. It is nasty business. Failure can be even nastier. Either may shock and shame loved ones. There is no legal way to invite them to attend a comfortable, quick assisted departure and comfort each other afterward.
The Hemlock Society U.S.A. is the lead national organization working for change. It wants to legalize assisted death for terminally ill people who choose it - but not impose it on anyone. Hemlock has 22,000 dues-paying members, publishes a periodic newsletter on developments worldwide, and sells some 24 books on dying including "Final Exit," a "how to" best seller. It also disseminates voluminous information from its web site: http://www.hemlock.org/hemlock. Its office can be reached by calling 1-800-247-7421. Hemlock Hawaii can be found in the phone book. I am a member.
With strong controls, I personally would like to see assisted death made an option even for non-terminal people who choose it because of hopeless disease situations. Among our loved ones we now can legally help only our pets, an irony.
Denver is the new national headquarters of Hemlock and the site for a Nov. 7-9 national convention on the theme "Death Isn't the Enemy, Suffering Is." Several hundred attendees will hear from Derek Humphry, who founded Hemlock in 1980, and Dr. Jack Kevorkian's attorney, Geoffrey Feiger.
Recently I visited in Denver Hemlock's new executive director, Faye Girsh, a former clinical and forensic psychologist. Unlike Kevorkian, she is feminine and attractive. She has seen unbearable suffering close up and considers it morally wrong to impose it on people against their will.
She praises Dr. Kevorkian for bringing national attention to the problem but says that without clear guidelines it is impossible to determine if Kevorkian or anyone else providing aid in dying is behaving responsibly.
The U.S. Supreme Court decision to rule on the right to assisted death in its 1996-97 term will energize the convention, she says. She rejoices that the first legislatively approved doctor-assisted death occurred Sept. 26 in Darwin, Australia, under a law passed last year by the Northern Territories of Australia.
The Netherlands does not legally OK assisted death but permits it if doctors follow extensive guidelines and then report their action to a prosecutor. About 3,000 people a year die that way. A comparable figure in Hawaii would be around 200, far smaller than the 1,300 terminal patients who now seek humane, supervised hospice care. Girsh highly recommends hospice in most cases.
GIRSH came to her job from one of Hemlock's most active chapters, in San Diego. She wants to expand its information services, create support groups for despairing patients to counsel with each other and create advocacy groups to see that physicians and families really follow the instructions of living wills. Today many don't.
There is a slippery slope argument that once assisted death is legal it will be abused. Girsh turns this around. She says we have today a slippery slope path to legal torturous overtreatments and use it often.
She considers the terms suicide and euthanasia less descriptive of what Hemlock seeks to legalize than assisted death.
National polls show more than 70 percent of Americans favor assisted death under controlled circumstances. Some states have a majority of physicians in favor despite opposition from the American Medical Association.