INFORMED OPINIONS ON TODAY’S TOPICS

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court announced that in its upcoming term it will hear arguments on physician-assisted suicide.

The issue has been building in this country during the last few years as authorities in Michigan have tried unsuccessfully to convict assisted-suicide proponent Dr. Jack Kevorkian. Meanwhile, some other countries have opened the door to letting patients determine when and how they will die.

The moral arguments for and against suicide as a choice have become more complicated in an era of advancing medical technology.

Should physician-assisted suicide be legal?

Griffith Thomas, Encino pathologist and lawyer:

“People have a right to have their pain relieved, which is what doctors have done a terrible job of. . . . People should be able to die with dignity. . . . The fact is, lying in bed, in diapers, in their own feces and needing someone else to do everything for them is not dignity. . . . Sanctity is really a loaded word. What is the sanctity of the person writhing in bed, in pain, who cannot control their own bowels? I submit to you there is no [sanctity] about that whatsoever. The sanctity of life is one of those cliches that people don’t really think through.”

Alexander Capron, professor of law and medicine and co-director of the Pacific Center for Health Policy and Ethics at USC:

“My answer is no. . . . There can be no way to restrict it to terminally ill patients. The category is impossible to define, and doctors will start muddling that up right away. . . . This could push patients toward immediate termination of their lives, rather than dealing with the patients’ needs, which is the harder thing to do. . . . If you are handicapped, if you are poor, or you are older, it’s very hard to know what voluntary means. . . . The situation can evolve from where it is truly voluntary, as the Dutch started, to where it is judged by others that they should end their lives.”

David C. Blake, director of the Bioethics Institute sponsored by St. John’s Hospital and Loyola Marymount University:

“What is really at stake is the ability to dramatically cut short your life and have a constitutionally protected right to die. . . . If right now, we recognize all sorts of people as having the right to forgo treatment, it’s not clear why physician-assisted suicide would be limited to the terminally ill. . . . What about the chronic paranoid schizophrenic who is tired of being a paranoid schizophrenic? . . . We’re opening a door that never could be open just a little bit. It will be open very wide.”

Betty Odello, a nurse and an associate professor of philosophy at Pierce College:

“I am leaning more against it than for it. That means that someone has a duty to assist you, a duty to kill you. That’s where I have a major rub. . . . People think it’s their only way to have control. We don’t listen about their pain. We don’t listen to people about their feelings about being over-treated. They say, ‘I just want to kill myself.’ . . . If we make this legally OK, then it automatically implies that it’s morally OK. I don’t think the two are the same. . . . If people would use the new medical technology they have, pain is not a reason to ask for suicide. . . . I just think that we have to make sure we’re not prolonging the dying, but we’re not hastening it either.”

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