BOOKS
BOOKS Obligation to Die A Chosen Death: The Dying Confront Assisted Suicide by Lonny Shavelson Simon & Schuster. 240 pages. $23.00. by Kathi Wolfe At a recent party. I met a doctor who...
...For example, in December, George Delury was indicted on manslaughter charges for allegedly helping his fifty-two-year-old wife...
...Doctors are members of the general public...
...According to a Louis Harris poll, nearly half of the general public says it is afraid of disabled people...
...We come to know Shavelson's subjects as fully human beings: sometimes likable, occasionally disagreeable...
...Instead, he found Sarah, an untrained and emotionally unstable volunteer for a local Hemlock Society chapter, who assisted in his suicide...
...Value should be assessed...
...Shavelson savs...
...I squander millions of dollars on patients too elderly or too ill ever to return to meaningful function...
...In another entrv, he asked himself...
...this encounter didn't surprise me...
...he told me...
...I maybe serving my own interests more than hers...
...thinking he was being sympathetic...
...Shavelson argues that if assisted suicide were legalized, there wouldn't be anv "Sarahs" out there rushing to help people commit suicide...
...After intense lobbying from disability advocates across the country, she received the transplant in January...
...You are sucking my life out of me like a vampire...
...Some months ago in The San Francisco Chronicle physician Bruce Bartlow said, "As director of intensive care in a community hospital...
...Yet many people, including doctors...
...I wasn't convinced by Shavelson that assisted suicide would be carried out responsibly if it were made legal...
...But how many of us have Jensen's access to advocacy groups...
...I thought, while hastily pursuing more cheerful conversation...
...Shavelson has two agendas: to profile five people (three with terminal illnesses and two with disabilities) who wanted help in ending their lives...
...African Americans, gay people—all people whose lives are deemed too costly, too great a burden, or of too little value-could be pressured not only to forgo medical treatment but to opt for assisted suicide...
...Some thirty-seven million Americans have no health insurance, health-care rationing is fast becoming a reality, and health-care providers are being pressured to cut costs anv way they can...
...most have the same attitude toward disabled people as everyone else...
...Jensen had lived on her own and held a job for years...
...He wrote of the "tyranny" that caring for her cast over his life and of his uncertainty over whether she had actually chosen suicide...
...I find this hard to accept...
...During the last three months of his wife's life, Delury kept a diary...
...Hospital review committees would assess these physicians' recommendations to determine if assisted suicide should occur...
...So I find Shavelson's trust in the wisdom of physicians a hard pill to swallow...
...Shavelson is a humane physician and writer...
...In contrast to many works on social policy issues written by physicians, his work includes the views of those who are often discounted or disrespected by the medical profession...
...And disabled people are being refused medical treatment...
...Delury wrote that he wished he could say to his wife, *'I have fallen prey to the tyranny of a victim...
...of the way our society tells us that "disability is a fate worse than death...
...Shavelson holds the "liberal" view that assisted suicide is an issue centered on freedom of choice: that people who are terminally ill or disabled should have the right to choose to die if they are undergoing unendurable suffering...
...Good dav to vou...
...A competent counselor wanted George to get professional help so that he wouldn't rush to end his life...
...We must face the un-American fact that not all individuals' remaining lives have equal value...
...But despite its intentions, this work shows the need for all of us to care for and value everyone's life, rather than work for "the right to die...
...an emergency-room physician and photojournalism gives us a well-written, lively book...
...A Chosen Death had the opposite effect: it confirmed mv opposition to assisted suicide...
...In one entry...
...In A Chosen Death...
...Most books on social issues are filled with |argon and ponderous prose...
...I'd rather die than be blind...
...I met a doctor who proclaimed himself a liberal...
...Shavelson wants to turn the reader into an advocate for assisted suicide...
...The author believes that, with the proper safeguards, physician-assisted suicide should be legal...
...Shavelson unwittingly articulates the problems with the '"liberal" position on assisted suicide...
...I've encountered many doctors and mental-health professionals who, though well-meaning, have had prejudicial attitudes toward the disabled...
...Coercion takes many forms...
...Lebov had multiple sclerosis...
...Today, you can't pick up a newspaper or turn on the TV without reading or hearing about assisted suicide and "the right to die...
...ha\e a low opinion of the "quality of life" of people with disabilities...
...and to argue for the legalization of assisted suicide...
...it's representative Kathi Wolfe is a freelance writer in Falls Church, Virginia...
...Renee...
...So I've been thinking about those who believe we who are disabled would be better off dead...
...Yet in an effort to show the complexity of this issue...
...Disconcerting as it was...
...In this context, disabled people, the elderly...
...Is there any reason that doctors sitting on hospital review committees would put such prejudice aside in reviewing cases involving assisted suicide or allocation of medical treatment...
...If I comply...
...Is she still autonomous...
...He uses his skills as a journalist to present his arguments for assisted suicide...
...These physicians would confirm that the patient is terminally ill, has received adequate health care, and isn't depressed...
...For those who are marginalized in our country- "the right to die" could all too easily become "the obligation to die...
...Yet for me...
...When I was born, the doctors, on finding that I was blind, apologized to my parents for keeping me alive...
...was partially paralyzed as a result of two strokes...
...If assisted suicide were made legal, wouldn't there be physicians and mentalhealth professionals who would share George's dim view of his life...
...Take the case of Sandra Jensen, a thirtv-five-vear-old woman with Down syndrome who needed a heart-lung transplant...
...George and Sarah are pseudonyms...
...Yet I found A Chosen Death to be well worth reading...
...But George didn't want this sort of help...
...A Chosen Death informs public debate on one of the most emotionally charged, complex issues of our time...
...George, an emotionally troubled but not terminally ill man...
...Such values are rapidly becoming the norm in America today...
...My story isn't unique...
...Yet he exhibits a naive faith that if it were made legal, doctors could fairly regulate assisted suicide...
...Yet for many months, Jensen was rejected as a transplant candidate solely 0n the basis of her disability...
...an emergency disaster planner for the government, and Mary, a mystery writer, were terminally ill from cancer...
...I don't see why you people don't commit suicide...
...Terminally ill patients with only six months to live would be examined by two doctors...
...If she asks for the poison now but seems very depressed, should I comply...
...at times brave, more often frightened...
...Myrna Lebov, kill herself...
...Pierre, a circus trapeze artist who had AIDS, planned to kill himself, but died a few hours before...
...She has received a grant front the Kaiser Family Foundation and the National Press Foundation to report on assisted suicide and people with disabilities...
...Though Shavelson cares deeply about his subjects and their families, he uses their stories to buttress his argument for "the right to die...
...Medical school trains them to overcome disease, not to overcome prejudice...
...Depressed, he sought someone to help him kill himself...
...on how their survival enriches or drains their family and community...
...Shavelson also would have us believe physicians would ensure that people would choose assisted suicide without coercion...
...She had been an ardent advocate for people with disabilities and had been present when George Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act...
Vol. 60 • March 1996 • No. 3
