Where I Stand: Supreme Court can expand American killing fields

Wednesday, Jan. 22, 1997 | 11:59 a.m.

ASSEMBLYWOMAN GENE SEGERBLOM, D-Boulder City, doesn't want anybody to get her AB29 mixed up with physician-assisted suicide. Her bill, now before the Nevada Legislature, allows people to make a "living will" that artificial means should not be used to revive them if they have a severe heart attack or have ceased breathing. Extraordinary means should not be used to keep them alive.

This bill is several miles distant from the desires of some advocates like Dr. Jack Kevorkian who want to legalize suicide upon demand. The question of physician-assisted suicide is now before the U.S. Supreme Court. How the justices will decide the legality of this matter remains to be seen. There's no mention of any "right to die" in our Constitution.

Opponents to physician-assisted suicide point out that approval of the practice can start our society on a slippery slope which will result in deadly results for the infirm, elderly and disabled. They eagerly point to the Roe vs. Wade decision rendered 24 years ago today.

Roe vs. Wade legalized abortion in the United States and since that date more than 30 million babies have died. The lowest number of abortions reported after the first 20 years was 1,267,415 in 1994.

What started out as "a way to protect pregnant girls and keep them from having backroom abortions with coathangers" has turned into big business. Even our local Planned Parenthood group is now using the easy way out by using abortions instead of planning. What started out as merely a law to help a few poor girls has resulted in big business and allows abortions of babies just prior to birth. Certainly, nobody can argue that partial-birth and late-term abortions aren't a killing process.

Now the U.S. Supreme Court in its combined wisdom is going to determine the status of physician-assisted suicide. If the high court gives approval, there is no doubt that one more step has been taken in a society that eventually will legalize killing at the end of our lives. If a child is lucky enough to get past the abortion mills, he or she can then become concerned about how they will be treated when they become elderly or incapacitated and can no longer afford overpriced medical care.

We only have to look to Holland, where physician-assisted suicides are legal. Despite all the rules and regulations, Dutch doctors killed almost 6,000 patients, without their consent, in 1990.

An official estimate is that more than 20 percent of those killed without consent were competent but were not asked about their desires. The doctors who killed without consent gave excuses that included: patients had a low quality of life, were suffering or were creating a family hardship.

We can't forget Germany's official euthanasia campaign that killed 70,000 to 100,000 of their own people between 1939 and 1941. What started out as an attempt to kill seriously deformed German babies later included healthy political prisoners. The same methods were perfected to make concentration-camp killings more efficient a year later.

Even before the cases from New York and Washington arrived in the Supreme Court, the slippery slope to legalized murder was in place in Michigan. Dr. Ljubisa Dragovic, chief medical examiner for Oakland County, Mich., has supervised the autopsies of 31 of Kevorkian's dead bodies. Only five of them were terminally ill and faced certain and early death. Some of them didn't even have the diseases that were reasons given for seeking Kevorkian's help to die.

In his inaugural address Monday, President Clinton quoted the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin. Clinton said, "Let us remember the timeless wisdom of Cardinal Bernardin when facing the end of his own life: He said, 'It is wrong to waste the precious gift of time on acrimony and division.'"

The president, having the Supreme Court justices present, could have also quoted from a letter Bernardin wrote to the high court last November: "Creating a new 'right' to assisted suicide will endanger society and send a false signal that a less than 'perfect' life is not worth living." He added: "There is much that I have contemplated these last few months of my illness but, as one who is dying, I have especially come to appreciate the gift of life."

Before ruling on assisted suicide, justices of the U.S. Supreme Court should read Bernardin's letter. It wouldn't hurt President Clinton to read it also, as laws related to assisted suicide and late-term abortions come to him from Congress.