ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
Thursday, June 14, 2007

Disturbing lessons from the case of Dr. Death
By Colleen Carroll Campbell

Following Dr. Jack Kevorkian's release from prison this month, assisted-suicide
activists have taken to America's airwaves and oped pages to caution us against
getting the wrong idea about the right to die. Don't look at the ghoulish
practices of "Dr. Death," they tell us.

The 79-year-old pathologist assisted at the suicides of some 130 people, often
failing to dispose of his dead properly. After flouting the law for years,
Kevorkian was imprisoned in 1999 for the second-degree murder of a man with Lou
Gehrig's disease, whose death by lethal injection Kevorkian videotaped for "60
Minutes." In 2000, the New England Journal of Medicine published data from the
autopsies of 69 Kevorkian cases showing that only a quarter of his "patients"
were terminally ill and that five showed no evidence of physical illness.

Activists assure us that legalizing assisted suicide would not lead to a spate
of suicides among the depressed and disabled or a mandate to dispose of
burdensome infants and elderly. As a model, they cite Oregon, where a
controversial law has facilitated the physician-assisted suicides of about 300
people in the past decade. But critics note that Oregon's law does not require
autopsies or encourage critical investigation into the circumstances of those
deaths, so it is difficult to gauge its true effect.

We can find evidence of the consequences elsewhere. In the Netherlands, where
adult and teenage euthanasia has been legal since 2002, the Dutch Royal Medical
Association recently persuaded the government to establish a committee to
regulate infant euthanasia. According to a 2005 New England Journal of Medicine
article by Dutch doctors, some 600 Dutch infants die each year as a result of
medical decisions to end their lives, and 15 to 20 of these include "patients
who are not dependent on intensive medical treatment but for whom a very poor
quality of life, associated with sustained suffering, is predicted." So a
physician's forecast that a child will have a miserable life can double as a
death warrant.

The Dutch are not alone in their slide toward infanticide and involuntary
euthanasia. A 2005 study published in The Lancet that examined the deaths of
about 250 Belgian infants found that more than half of the deaths had followed
a doctor's decision to end the infant's life, sometimes using lethal doses of
medication. In a country in which adult euthanasia is legal and a push is
underway for legalized child and teenage euthanasia, most physicians surveyed
expressed willingness to end the lives of severely ill infants in their care.

In America, the "futile care theory" that says resources should not be wasted
on patients with poor prognoses is gaining traction; the theory's applications
can be deadly. In 2005, 11-year-old Haleigh Poutre had been hospitalized for
only eight days when her Massachusetts state custodians began fighting to
remove her ventilator and feeding tube. Doctors had diagnosed her condition as
a persistent vegetative state, but Poutre recovered before they could euthanize
her.

Most Americans believe that the terminally ill should be free to reject
excessively burdensome treatments with dubious benefits or unreasonable costs
relative to benefits. But laws that propose suicide as a solution to human
suffering reinforce the message that the disabled, depressed and severely ill
are burdens who can find dignity only in death.

When asked recently if he regretted the murder that landed him in prison,
Kevorkian said he had euthanized "a man whose life didn't measure up anymore."
Assisted suicide advocates may wince at Kevorkian's candor. But they cannot
deny the link between his logic and the push for laws that define human dignity
as contingent on our age, our condition and how we die.

Colleen Carroll Campbell is an author, television host and St. Louis-based
fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Her website is
www.colleen-campbell.com.