The debate over assisted suicide -17 May 1996

Somebody once said – and perhaps it was me – that in the end, government comes down to birth, death and taxes. This week the action of a court in the state of Michigan and the public declaration of four Republican governors, made two of those eternal preoccupations come alive as burning issues. First though, let me say that neither topic – one is the right to help people die, the other the right to an abortion – would normally, before now, have been thought off as fighting faiths in a presidential election. They've been there for a long time, like hecklers at a political rally, always raising a grouch and a shout in the crowd when the people in the rally had met to discuss the real issues.

So far this year, the main contest has been about two vague theories of government. The Republicans complaining that there's too much national government and most of it should be given to each of the 50 states to manage on their own. The Democrats saying that that's, nonsense that national government has to take responsibility for some basic things, and that the greatest of these is poverty. Through all the ups and downs of the two ancient parties since the Great Depression and the range of burning issues, most of which have cooled into indistinguishable heaps of ash. The Democrats, in good years and bad, have maddened the Republican Party and all conservatives, by professing their special unstinting concern for the poor and the dispossessed, whether or not the Democrats in their own lives, did little more than vote for people who profess the same superior brand of compassion.

Now Mr Clinton has maddened even more Republicans by quietly moving away from the ardent liberalism of his first campaign, though keeping the language of special compassion, and embracing much of the Republican view of government as being, yes too top heavy, too much paperwork and of course we are to go on cutting taxes for the middle class, the American backbone the people, right. How can we reconcile this new identity with the general view, which is true, that for the past 20 perhaps 30 years, the country has been growing more conservative. I can only say that since Mr Clinton has been steadily tiptoeing over to meet the Republicans halfway, if he wins in November you might say he won as a Republican for Clinton.

Well now there's the general background of issues.

Now about those two issues, which I called hecklers at party rallies, nuisance issues, that may not ever get into the party platforms. One which concerns us all in and out of election years, and which has been brought painfully to the attention of the young who normally give it little thought, is the question of what should a doctor do with a patient who is in prolonged agony and near death? The limelight fell dramatically this week on the retired pathologist Dr Jack Kevorkian, who for the third time was tried in a court, a Michigan circuit court, on a charge of having assisted in the suicide of a human being. In this case, of two middle-aged women. For the third time he was found innocent by a jury.

Now this is a special case. In fact the more we look at this problem, which is at once a medical and a moral problem, the more we'll discover that many are special cases. It is a moral problem, nothing like so simple as appears to people who say, of course we should ease pain or of course we cannot take a life. But I mean the third of the Kevorkian cases, was special in a legal sense, quite new in fact to the practice of law in the state of Michigan and it was the novelty of it as much as the general principle of being humane, that decided the verdict.

First I ought to say that Dr. Kevorkian's motives were beyond suspicion. He never helped to kill anyone who was in a state of less than continual agony. Dr. Kevorkian has assisted in all at 28 deaths or as the statute say suicide, an unfortunate word, which instantly suggests a religious prohibition to Catholics for instance.

In the first two trials, which took place in the past two years, Dr. Kevorkian was charged under a Michigan law that has since expired. It forgave, at least it said the word suicide did not apply if a doctor caused death by administering medications or procedures to relieve pain and suffering. The doctor was charged in the deaths of three patients all of whom were given medicines, all of whom had been pronounced by the hospital staffs terminal, so in retrospect, it's not very surprising that the first two juries stayed with the letter of the law and found him not guilty.

But now the third, the recent case. It was about two middle-aged women, companions who had chose to die together in a mountain cabin. Neither of these women was terminal, though both were in unceasing pain and never likely to be comfortable again. One had multiple sclerosis, by no means a fatal disease, the other had a series of badly botched operations on the same organ. Both testified on tape their aching wish to die, one died from breathing carbon monoxide, the other from a lethal injection both administered by Dr. Kevorkian.

The case against him was brought, because just over a year ago, a state prosecutor got a ruling from the Michigan Supreme Court, which said that assisted suicide quote: "had always been a common law crime," that's to say a law sanctioned by custom and not by any written law. This charge was much more restrictive. It made no concessions to medication or helpful procedures. The prosecutor just hammered away at the simple phrase, "assisted suicide is a crime." Well Dr. Kevorkian himself was the first to blurt out in court: "I recognise only laws passed by a legislature, not ones newly made up." And it turned out, that's the way the jury felt too. One of them put her finger on their doubts in the most vivid but artless way. While the case was being heard, the jury was not sequestered, she was out in her back garden racking leaves and she said to herself: "I didn't want someone to come along three years from now and say that raking leaves back then was illegal." She switched her vote and made it unanimous.

You will notice I've constantly said, a Michigan court, the Michigan Supreme Court, there is no federal law about assisted suicide. But now that Dr. Kevorkian has been set free, you may be sure there'll be other cases in other states with other laws. Yet, it has become, whether the politicians like it or not, a national issue and the attested fact that well over 70 per cent of Americans approve in general of assisted suicide, will give pause surely to prosecutors who come to pick a jury.

Of course it does have many medical opponents. Doctors alone have a range of opinions from those who will at the family's request, pull the plug, to those who, when there is no plug to pull, will not hasten death in anyway. Most I believe approve of administering, as they say, morphine by the clock, but there are those who will perform any operation however hopeless to enforce the general theory that life is sacred and must be maintained at all costs. A distinguished surgeon, an old friend of mine tells me that the most aggressive onlookers, participants if you like, the ones who want to keep even desperate treatments going another operation, a skin graft whatever, are usually young nurses.

My own mother-in-law, a lady towards the end in constant insufferable pain which she yet had to suffer, had a doctor who refused to give her anything stronger than aspirin, morphine for example, because he said gravely, "she might become an addict." She was in her 89th year!

The other heckling issue about the beginning of life, which threatens to loom embarrassingly large for the Republicans is one they are saddled with through no one's fault but their own, its the perennial question of abortion. And some Republican leaders believe they lost in 1992 because of Mr Pat Buchanan's promise of fire and brimstone if they didn't put a strong pro life condemnation of abortion in their party platform. The Republicans are being challenged on this issue more than ever by their own right wing. The Democrats lean back in the knowledge that the law, Roe versus Wade that sanctions a woman's right to an abortion, has been upheld by the Supreme Court, it is the law of the land.

But four years ago, the Republicans thought most Americans, appalled abortion and put it in their platform. They were wrong. Today, 75 per cent are in favour of the standing law. Four Republican governors have come out and begged Mr Dole to see that the anti-abortion plank is softened or removed from the party platform at this year's convention. Mr Buchanan threatens to call on the Almighty and all his resident angels to descend on San Diego and curse the party.

Senator Dole hoping at all times to have the votes of the Christian right, committed himself too soon as pro-life candidate, but then, he could always postpone consideration while he was busy legislating as the Republican's senate leader. Now that he's taken the dramatic step of resigning from the Senate, abortion is only one of the prickly issues he's going to have to give his whole time too. So now, for the next five and a half months, we can give here, to a candidate who so far has been vague and technical and mumbley, but the great news is he has found himself a speech writer a man who can swing a sentence with punch and grace. It has already begun to transform the image of the former Senator Dole making him not quite as the French say, a dead ringer for Humphrey Bogart, but at least a campaigner who no longer mumbles but is seen to have the gift of tongues. Watch it Bill Clinton!

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