Remember Dr. Kevorkian?

For those of you who are too young, he was a retired pathologist back in the 1990s who helped terminally ill people end their lives as a sort of crusade. This was completely illegal at the time, everywhere in the country. He was prosecuted a couple of times, but juries would not convict -- apparently you couldn ' t find 12 people who thought that what he did deserved criminal sanction. This was despite his notably abrasive personality. He wasn ' t a persuasive person, but his actions spoke for themselves and most people evidently supported them.He finally was convicted. The basic difference was that in the previous cases, he had set up his " suicide machine " -- a gas delivery system -- and let his customers (I don ' t know if you should call them patients) push the button themselves. In the case for which he was convicted, the client was paralyzed and unable to initiate the process, so the good doctor did it himself. This seems a trivial moral distinction to me -- the guy very clearly articulated his desire -- but it does seem to matter to many people.Anyway, so-called Physician Assisted Dying (PAD) is now legal in Oregon, Washington, Vermont, Colorado and the District of Columbia, by law; and in Montana, by court decision. (A law in California was recently overturned on a technicality before it could take effect. We ' ll see where that goes.) Here ' s a summary history. I expect that PAD sounds better than physician assisted suicide, and I ' ll grant that there is...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs