X-Message-Number: 3534
From:  (David Stodolsky)
Subject: CRYONICS: Out of the Closet on the Right to Die
Date: Sun, 25 Dec 94 18:21:21 +0100 (CET)



Forward of article <> () by "JOHN FANNING, CDC NAC" 
<>:
      
"Out of the Closet on the Right to Die"
American Medical News (12/12/94) Vol. 37, No. 46, P. 13;  Morain,
Claudia
     Physicians are helping young, politically savvy AIDS patients in 
the push for assisted suicide.  "I've always believed every 
person has the right to freedom of decisions about their own 
body, including the timing and mode of their own death," 
testified AIDS specialist Dr. Peter Shalit.  Earlier this year, 
Shalit was a plaintiff in the Washington state case--propelled by
a woman with AIDS--that overturned the state's 140-year-old ban 
on assisted suicide.  Similar cases are taking place around the 
country.  Ralph Mero, executive director of Compassion in Dying, 
said that nearly half of the group's calls for aid-in-dying come 
from people with AIDS.  "It is a captive population which has 
already been condemned to death," said Mero.  "They want 
options."  A survey in the New England Journal of Medicine of 938
doctors found that 53 percent thought assisted suicide should be 
legal, and 40 percent said that would be willing to participate 
in it--there was much less support for euthanasia, which many 
defined as active killing.  Assisted suicide proponents contend 
that legalizing aid-in-dying would end the suffering caused by 
failed suicides and would better protect the patients by being 
open and regulated.
  


David S. Stodolsky, PhD               Internet: 
Tornskadestien 2, st. th.       (C)         Tel.: + 45 38 33 03 30
DK-2400 Copenhagen NV, Denmark               Fax: + 45 38 33 88 80

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