ROYAL OAK, MI – Thirty years ago, Jack Kevorkian, a retired pathologist, was waging a crusade for physician-assisted suicide for the suffering which made him internationally famous.
At that time, it was strictly illegal in every state to help someone kill themselves, no matter how great their suffering or how terminal their illness. But though he was charged time and again, no jury would ever convict him. For a time, in fact, assisted suicide, at least as practiced by Kevorkian, was de facto legal in Michigan.
That ended in 1998, however, when Kevorkian ratcheted his crusade up to euthanasia, got convicted of murder, and went to jail, later dying in near-obscurity in 2011. But now there’s a chance that Michigan may make physician-assisted suicide actually legal.
Democrats, who in 2022 won control of every branch of state government, introduced bills in the state senate late last year that would allow terminally ill patients to seek a doctor’s aid in dying.
State Sen. Mary Cavanagh (D-Redford Township), one of the bills’ four sponsors, released a statement saying that “Patients deserve the trust and respect to make their own medical decisions, including the choice to determine their own timeline to end ongoing suffering during the oftentimes dark battle they face.”
She called it “a compassionate policy that would provide Michiganders and their loved ones with peace of mind when facing terminal illness.” The future of these “death with dignity” bills is uncertain. Thanks to two resignations, Democrats are down to a 54-54 tie in the state house of representatives, at least till special elections are held to fill those seats in April.
Nor is it known if they would receive any bipartisan support. But what is clear is that if Michigan was a pioneer in accepting doctor-assisted death in the 1990s, other states have since passed it by. What many advocates now prefer to call “medical aid in dying,” or MAID, is now legal in 10 states and the District of Colombia.
Those include Oregon, the first to legalize the practice, followed (not in order) by Washington, California, Montana, New Jersey, Colorado, New Mexico, Maine, Vermont and Hawaii.
Most of these states limit the legality of this to patients who doctors say have six months or less to live, and are residents of the state in which they seek to die. But in 2022, a Connecticut woman, Lynda Bluestein, and a group called Compassion in Dying, sued Vermont, and the state first agreed to allow her to come to Vermont to die, and then changed the law to allow anyone to do so.
Bluestein, who had terminal cancer, then died with the aid of a doctor on January 4, 2024. According to her husband Paul and the Associated Press, her last words were “I’m so happy I don’t have to (suffer) anymore.” Linda Barnard, a Vermont physician, said that while she was pleased Bluestein found relief, “everybody deserves to have access much closer to home.”
If a serious effort is made in Lansing to pass bills allowing medical aid in dying, it is certain to restart a huge ethical debate over the issue that has always been simmering. Polls have consistently shown that a large and gradually increasing majority of Americans (72 percent, in one Gallup poll) are in favor of allowing terminally ill people to end their suffering with a physician’s assistance.
But assisted suicide also has powerful opponents, including the Roman Catholic Church, the American Medical Association and most disability rights organizations, who fear it would put pressure on their members to hurry their deaths along. Support or opposition does cut across partisan lines; Ralph Nader has opposed legalizing medical aid in dying; George Will supports it. But of the states that have legalized it, all but Montana vote heavily Democratic.
The right-to-die movement did get a surprising boost late last year from an unexpected source beyond the grave: Actress Diana Rigg, who had a long career and mesmerized millions, especially young men, in the 1960s as the beautiful, athletic and brainy Mrs. Emma Peel in the popular British TV show The Avengers.
In December, Rigg’s daughter, Rachel Stirling, released a tape made by her mother shortly before her agonizing death in September, 2020, in which the actress pleads with the British parliament to give people the right to determine when to die, to “have true agency over their own bodies at the end of life.”
Dismissing opponents of choice, she said “the fact of the matter is that I have lost control of my bowels. This, to me, is the most dehumanizing thing … I think it is unfair that I don’t have a choice. I think it is unfair that other people don’t have a choice.”
Parliament is expected to take up the issue early this year. What will happen there, and in Michigan, is still far from certain.
However, what is certain is that as tens of millions of baby boomers age, and many feel trapped in painful living hells created by ancient and malfunctioning bodies, this issue is not going to go away.
-30-
(Editor’s Note: A version of this column also appeared in the Toledo Blade.)
