Choosing death The right to die on own terms

“Good Life, Good Death” —The Hemlock Society (1980-2003) motto “Kevorkian Sentenced to 10 to 25 Years in Prison” —The New York Times, April14, 1999

“Soylent Green is people,” Charlton Heston’s character mutters, then shouts, in the 1973 film Soylent Green, after he discovers that the highly coveted protein feed is not made from plankton after all.

The film, set in 2022, portrays how authorities on an overcrowded Earth allowed and maybe even encouraged citizens to choose their times of death and surroundings for the event, and then secretly made protein feed from their corpses.

On the assisted suicide timeline, Soylent Green pre-dated both The Hemlock Society, originally a Southern California group advocating that assisted suicide should be available to terminally ill people, and Dr. Jack Kevorkian (called Dr. Death, by some), who not only advocated physicianassisted suicide for the terminally ill but was jailed for taking part in one.

The issue of assisted suicide most recently came to the public’s attention earlier this month, when Diane Rehm, the nationally known former NPR talk-show host, testified in Maryland to support a proposed physicianassisted suicide statute for terminally ill patients. Physician-assisted suicide currently is legal in seven states and the District of Columbia.

According to news reports, Rehm’s testimony included a description of her terminally ill husband’s stoic decision to stop eating and drinking until he died, to spare himself several months of suffering. Instead, his death process took just 10 days. Still, in a civilized society, we must question a system that forces terminally ill patients to suffer for even 10 days. Is it really unreasonable to allow such patients to obtain a doctor’s prescription for life-ending drugs, and to allow those patients to administer such drugs to themselves?

That is what the proposed Maryland statute would allow, for adults diagnosed with six months or less to live, and with a certified capacity to make the decision to die.

Although people with certain religious beliefs would never engage in assisted suicide, it seems ruthless of them to impose their belief systems on others who are suffering. Opposing physician-assisted suicide for every terminally ill patient is unconscionable.

While we may not be ready to give healthy people the assisted-suicide option as portrayed in Soylent Green, it is time for the General Assembly and the governor to compassionately move a physician-assisted suicide measure for the terminally ill into the statute books.

The year 2022 is only three years and one more General Assembly session away. Bruce Plopper lives in Conway and is a former member of The Hemlock Society.