Assisted Suicide Rejected by AMA

The American Medical Assn.’s governing body voted overwhelmingly to reaffirm the organization’s strong opposition to assisted suicide and called for intensified efforts to prepare physicians to provide pain relief and meet other needs of patients who are nearing the end of their lives.

The virtually unanimous vote in a Chicago meeting by the AMA’s 430-member House of Delegates, the policy-making body for organized medicine in the U.S., recommitted the organization to fight efforts in state legislatures and the courts to legalize physician-assisted suicide.

The vote came at a time of intensifying national debate over the issue of physician-assisted suicide and the public crusade to legalize the practice by Jack Kevorkian, a retired Michigan pathologist who has helped 31 people end their lives.