14
Wednesday, June 13, 1990 / University Daily Kansan
People want right to die
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Eight of 10 Americans believe patients should be allowed to die in some circumstances and about half say some incurably ill people have a moral right to commit suicide, according to a poll released yesterday.
The poll, by the Times Mirror Center for The People and The Press, was conducted a month before Dr. Jack Kervorkian, a retired pathologist in Pontiac, Mich., assisted in the June 4 suicide of Adkins, who had been diagnosed as being in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease
Diane Colasan, a researcher for the Times Mirror Center who is based in Princeton, N.J., said the survey did not reveal any abuse insisted suicide, but added, "I think what we found is relevant to the Kervorkian case."
The survey found that 80 percent of those polled believed there were some circumstances in which a patient should be allowed to die. Only 15 percent thought doctors and nurses should always do everything possible to save a patient's life.
Forty-nine percent said a person with an incurable disease had the moral right to commit suicide, compared with the 40 percent who expressed such a view in a 1975 Gallup poll.
a fifty-percent percent said there was a moral right to commit suicide if a person was suffering great pain with no hope of improvement. Forty-one percent held such a view in the 1975 survey.
Susan M. Wolf, a lawyer with the Hastings Center, a research institute in Briarcliff Manor, N.Y., that studies medical ethics, said there was a doctor withholding life support and a doctor assisting in a suicide.
non medical ethics and law treat those things as exact opposites of one another," she said. "In both ethics and law, it is very widely agreed now that the doctor is really mandated to stop life-sustaining treatment at the patient's request. In order to ask the question of physician-assisted suicide, both medical ethics and the criminal law roundly condemn that as it stands."
Many states have right-to-die laws, but the question has remained a controversial one. The Supreme Court is expected to rule soon on the efforts of a Missouri couple to remove life support from their 31-year-old daughter, Nancy Cruzan, who was severely brain damaged in a car crash. The Justice Department has sided with the state of Missouri in attempting to block removal of the life-support equipment.
In 1985, the Lou Harris polling organization asked whether a patient who was terminally ill, with no hope in sight, had the right to ask a doctor to be put out of misery. Sixty-one percent said, "Yes;."
Colasano said the percentage of affirmative responses was an increase over previous polls on the same question.
A poll last year by Opinion Research Associates said that 66 percent of people surveyed believed a physician should be allowed by law to end the life of an incurably ill patient, she said.
Kervorkian has not been charged.
Oakland County Circuit Judge Alice Gilbert ordered him to stop using a device he calls the suicide machine or taking other steps to help people kill themselves until prosecutors decide whether to try him. Prosecutors say toxicological tests on Ms. Adams' brain, to determine whether the 54-year-old, Portland, Ore., woman had Alzheimer's disease, will take up to two months.
The Times Mirror Center, an adjunct of the Times Mirror publishing and broadcasting organization, conducted telephone interviews with 1,213 adults from May 1 to May 5. It said the results are subject to an error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
Dukakis' 'joke' not funny to USAir
The Associated Press
BOSTON — USAir said its staff erred in not detaining Gov. Michael S. Dukakis for questioning when he joked as he boarded a plane that there could be a bomb in a White House aide's luggage.
Patricia Goldman, a spokesman for USAir in Arlington, Va., said
allowing Dukakis to board was an "error in procedure." Federal Aviation Administration rules say anyone who comments about devices that could threaten passengers faces detainment, questioning and a possible fine.
spired with a police union to disrupt the state Democratic Convention in Springfield with a demonstration June 2.
As to his comment, the governor said, "The humor of it was obvious to everyone who was there."
Dukakis aimed his barb at Ron Kaufman, a Republican political operative who Democrats claim con-
Kaufman said he didn't think it was funny, given the fear people have of bombs and flying.
24th and IOWA