ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, April 30, 1996 TAG: 9604300081
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: C-5 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
SOURCE: Associated Press
THE DEATHS OF THE DISABLED and disadvantaged might be unfairly hastened if doctors had the right to assist in their deaths, physicians warned Monday.
The poor and the disabled could be victimized if doctor-assisted suicides become accepted practice, physicians testified at a House hearing Monday.
Medical experts before the Judiciary subcommittee on the constitution stressed that protecting the socially vulnerable should supersede the individual right to determine the time of death.
Without universal access to health care, right-to-die laws ``place the dying who are the most vulnerable citizens at risk of death as the cheaper, easier way to limit excessive health care costs,'' said Dr. Kathleen Foley, chief of pain service at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.
Two federal appeals courts have recently struck down state bans on doctor-assisted suicides, shifting to the Supreme Court the question of whether states can bar a doctor from actively helping a patient die.
Thirty-five states have statutes prohibiting assisted suicide, the practice that has gained national prominence with Dr. Jack Kevorkian's open challenges to Michigan's ban.
One court decision rested on the constitutional right to privacy in the decision of how and when to die. The other said allowing doctors to disconnect life-support systems but banning other ways to end the lives of the terminally ill was unlawful discrimination.
But the experts warned that the right to die was being extended without proper supports for living. ``Society has not met its responsibility to plan adequately for end-of-life care,'' said Dr. Lonnie Bristow, president of the American Medical Association, joining others in urging more emphasis on palliative care and hospices for the terminally ill.
Dr. Diane Coleman of the Progress Center for Independent Living in Oak Park, Ill., said that for the disabled, the right to die could become the ``duty to die.'' Coleman, who uses a wheelchair, said some may feel that ``our untimely deaths are ultimately acceptable in the interest of the `greater good.'''
The option of choosing death ``would be much more attractive if you are poor'' and lack access to health care or hospices, said University of Michigan law professor Yale Kamisar.
Rep. Charles Canady, R-Fla., chairman of the panel, said legalizing doctor-assisted suicide ``would result in abandoning to death those most vulnerable in our society.''
One supporter of doctor-assisted suicide, Dr. Timothy Quill of the University of Rochester School of Medicine, stressed that life-ending measures should be taken only as a last resort when the terminally ill patient is suffering intolerably in ways that can't be relieved by palliative measures.
But Dr. Herbert Hendin of the American Suicide Foundation pointed to what he said were abuses in the Netherlands, where assisted suicides are permitted. He cited a report finding that in more than 1,000 cases, out of 130,000 deaths in the Netherlands each year, doctors admitted they actively caused or hastened death without any request from the patient.
LENGTH: Medium: 62 linesby CNB