A Good Death by Sandra Martin

Author:Sandra Martin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada
Published: 2016-03-10T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

Dying in the Shadows

By the early 1990s, there were right-to-die organizations in more than two dozen countries with several hundred thousand paying members and tens of millions of unaffiliated believers, according to Richard N. Côté in his book, In Search of Gentle Death: The Fight for Your Right to Die with Dignity. “The self-deliverance genie had been freed from its bottle and had taken on a robust, self-sustaining life,” he writes. But opposition from religious, right to life, and disability groups as well as pro-life medical ethicists had also swelled, with sanctity-of-life proponents articulating fears of a slippery slope leading to Nazi-like atrocities against the weak, the vulnerable, and the elderly.

The problem for people who wanted “chosen” deaths, as with so much in life, was access. The terminally ill who were wealthy, well-connected, or daring could find the means to end their lives, but many others had no choice but to suffer it out. As Ronald Dworkin wrote in “Assisted Suicide: The Philosopher’s Brief” in the New York Review of Books in March 1997, “the current two-tier system—a chosen death and the end of pain outside the law for those with [medical] connections and stony refusals for most other people—is one of the greatest scandals of contemporary medical practice.”

Given the intransigence of politicians and medical associations to accommodate the wishes of a large part of the general public, Côté described how new technology that circumvented doctors was being developed by a new breed of activists he called “euthanasia activists.” John Hofsess was one of them.

“I was definitely influenced by Kevorkian (more than I realized initially),” Hofsess told me in an email in July 2015, revealing publicly for the first time that he was a death supplier as well as a right-to-die activist. He remained discouraged by the failure of the Rodriguez challenge at the Supreme Court, the Senate committee’s unwillingness to recommend abolishing the law against assisted suicide, and Parliament’s intransigence in acting on the modest changes the Senate committee had proposed. So Hofsess began shifting his emphasis. He morphed the Right to Die Society into an “overground” political action organization and an “underground” service provider for people he deemed in need who had approached him privately for help in ending their lives.

As a lay person, Hofsess had no access to prescription drugs, which was true for Jack Kevorkian as well, after his medical licence was suspended in Michigan. That is why Kevorkian switched to a mixture of helium and carbon monoxide and later carbon monoxide on its own. Hofsess said he approved of Kevorkian’s “hands-on activist approach and shared his attitude, which veered sharply from Derek Humphry’s hands-off do-it-yourself approach” in Final Exit. “Jack may have seemed clownish at times in public appearances at courthouses, but he was seriously dedicated to his patients,” Hofsess believes.

He also liked the fact that Kevorkian offered his services for free, compared to Humphry, who Hofsess feels “monetized the DIY business,” boasting that his Final Exit manual has sold more than a million copies.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.