Michigan Voters Face
Assisted Suicide Ballot Initiative
By Liz Townsend

Michigan pro-lifers and a diverse coalition of other groups are gearing up to fight a ballot initiative that would legalize assisted suicide. An organization named after Merian Frederick, reported to be the 19th person "assisted" by Jack Kevorkian, collected enough signatures to include the initiative on the ballot November 3. It would allow physicians to prescribe medication intended to cause the death of a patient.

"We're getting ready for a fully engaged campaign with a broad coalition including hospice groups, disability groups, and organized physicians' groups who all say the proposal should be defeated," Ed Rivet, legislative director of Right to Life of Michigan, told NRL News. "Plus, we have the potentially positive factor of Jack Kevorkian - - every time he does something outrageous he hurts the other side."

Kevorkian's antics, which now include harvesting organs from one of his victims and an upcoming trial for resisting arrest and obstructing a police officer, clearly do not improve the public image of practitioners of assisted suicide. As a Michigan resident interviewed by the Detroit News succinctly put it, "I oppose Dr. Kevorkian," said Doris Housner of Livingston County. "I feel the ballot issue gives him permission to go ahead and do whatever he wants."

At a June 7 news conference, Kevorkian announced that he had harvested the kidneys of his latest victim, quadriplegic Joseph Tushkowski, 45, and would donate them for transplantation to anyone who wanted them. Kevorikian said that this was only the first offer of this kind - - from now on he would ask his " patients" if they would donate their organs. The organs were harvested just three days after the eighth anniversary of the death of Kevorkian's first victim, Janet Adkins. "Just as Janet Adkins was the first, this is the first of the line," he said.

After conducting an autopsy on Tushkowski's body, Oakland County Medical Examiner L.J. Dragovic, a longtime Kevorkian critic, derided the organ removal as "mutilation,"according to the Associated Press. "They didn't remove his sweater. They just pulled it up, then cut the belly," Dragovic said. "This is not a situation to be compared with the highly skilled act of organ procurement surgery ... we're talking about a chopped-up body."

Every hospital and doctor contacted by the news organizations refused to have anything to do with Kevorkian's plans. "It does not meet any of the legal or ethical standards of transplantation,"Dr. Jeremiah Turcotte, founder of the University of Michigan Medical Center's kidney transplant program, told the Detroit News.

"We accept organs only from sterile hospital operating rooms," Wendy Rose of Gift of Life of Michigan, the state's only donor network, told the News. "We cannot and will not accept organs that blatantly violate federal transplantation procedures."

Kevorkian said the organs would be viable for transplantation for 36 hours, which would be about 11 p.m. Monday, June 8. The deadline came and went without any calls from physicians, according to Kevorkian's lawyer Michael Schwartz, although over 200 kidney patients and their relatives did request information, the Detroit Free Press reported.

Kevorkian's current legal trouble revolves around an incident that occurred May 7 when he and his "partner," Georges Reding, were delivering the body of 26-year-old quadriplegic Matt Johnson to Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Michigan.

According to the Detroit Free Press, police officers approached the car and began to ask questions about the body in the back seat, but Kevorkian refused to cooperate, shouting, "You'll have to kill me" and "Go to hell." The officers subdued Kevorkian and arrested him and Reding.

Kevorkian's attorney Michael Odette told the Detroit News that Kevorkian plans on playing an active role in his defense, a prospect that has prosecutors standing firm. "We'll put up with the circus," said Deputy Assistant City Attorney Jim Marcinkowski. "If we've come to the point in our society where people can walk up to a hospital and drop off a dead body like laundry and get in their car and drive away, then that's an extremely sad state of affairs."

Marcinkowski added, "you just don't dump a body and run. Kevorkian is not an exception to the law."

The Michigan legislature is still working to pass a law that clearly bans Kevorkian's death crusade. The House voted 66-40 to pass a law banning assisted suicide March 12, joining the Senate, which passed the ban in December.

However, the bill has not yet been sent to the governor for his expected signature, according to Rivet, because pro-lifers are working to secure the support of two-thirds of House members to allow the law to go into effect immediately once Gov. John Engler signs the bill. If two-thirds of the legislators do not vote for the bill, it will not go into effect until April 1999 (the bill passed by a two-thirds majority in the Senate already). Rivet said that a few more weeks are left in the current legislative session to try to secure the needed votes. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1997 that there is no constitutional right to assisted suicide, opening the way for states to ban the practice without fear of Court reversal.

If the ballot initiative passes, however, it will supersede the recently passed law. The initiative was sponsored by a group called Merian's Friends, named for Merian Frederick, a victim of assisted suicide on October 22, 1993. Frederick had Lou Gehrig's disease.

The group delivered over 379,000 signatures to state election officials May 26. In order to get an initiative on the ballot, 247,000 valid signatures are required.

The initiative is similar to the law now in effect in Oregon. It would allow "terminally ill" people to receive a prescription for lethal drugs from a physician. The patient would have to wait seven days before filling the prescription.

Since Kevorkian's medical license was suspended in 1991, he would not qualify as a "physician" able to provide the lethal prescriptions under the proposed law. However, pro-lifers are not convinced the law will protect against abuses. "This initiative is as full of holes as Oregon's," said Rivet.

Polls conducted on the assisted suicide issue have shown that support for the initiative is dropping. "Our tracking over the last several years shows support has waned from the mid-60s down to the mid-50s," pollster Ed Sarpolus told the Detroit News in March, "as the media has reported Jack Kevorkian has aided in suicides of people who aren't terminally ill, suffering from chronic pain, or near death." The News's most recent poll showed support at only 44%.

Members of the coalition opposing the initiative are speaking out strongly against legalizing assisted suicide. "As physicians, we know that patients generally consider suicide out of desperation," said Dr. Tom George, an anesthesiologist and hospice medical director in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in a press release issued by the physicians' group Advocates for Better Care. "That's disturbing to us because we know such fear and desperation is unnecessary. We have the means to give patients dignity and comfort without killing them."

"The hospice community is very concerned that the legalization of physician-assisted suicide will provide an option that will prevent people with a serious illness from seeking proper help, and from discovering the goodness of life that can be found, even while dying," according to a press release issued by the Michigan Hospice Organization. "To encourage an early end to one's life by creating a law that would legalize assisted suicide is to take a giant step backward regarding the care of the terminally ill in Michigan."