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Friday October 11, 1996

Should dying be a right?

Wracked with physical and emotional agony, AIDS patients and victims of cancer and other life-threatening illnesses are seeking ways to end their lives on their own terms.

Clutching pills or hooked to suicide machines, they are fighting for what many call the ultimate right -- the right to die.

In the coming months, the U.S. Supreme Court will consider whether states can prohibit doctor-assisted suicides. The issue has gained national attention, largely because of Dr. Jack Kevorkian's campaign to help ailing patients end their lives. As two front-page stories in this week's paper point out, many doctors are willing to provide such help.

Judaism may be unalterably opposed to suicide, since it is the taking of life, but right-to-die issues are far from clear.

It is hard to argue with the stance that a person's life is his or hers to end, that choosing to die is the ultimate assertion of choice and free will.

If life has become so excruciating that every breath and every step evokes suffering, who is to say that ending one's life is wrong? Who but an ailing person can decide when his or her suffering has become unbearable?

But there are many gray areas.

How is it possible to determine whether a person wanting to commit suicide is making a studied, rational choice rather than impulsively deciding to die during a moment of particular desperation?

And are there circumstances under which a physician should be allowed to help a person die? Are such doctors asserting a power no human should have over another, or are they compassionate heroes?

The issues that prompt such questions are far too sensitive, the range of human experience far too broad, for easy answers.

Nonetheless, such questions warrant continued discussion -- by doctors, medical ethicists and spiritual leaders, as well as those who are ailing and their loved ones.

In this complex debate, one thing is clear. The ill and dying deserve to face their struggles with as much support and compassion as possible.

While suicide is an alternative for the suffering, so is counseling and hospice care, the promise of new drugs and the possibility that even in one's deepest despair, hope can emerge.

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