Assisted Suicide

A Columbia man is being investigated by Howard County authorities in the death of his ailing 89-year-old mother, a case that could raise the issue of assisted suicide.After the death Sept. 7 of Helen Vanmeter Fishback, a housemother for football players at the University of Kentucky decades ago, authorities struggled to determine whether it was a suicide or slaying -- or a combination of both. Police, who found her dead in the apartment she shared with her son, initially thought it was a suicide and investigated whether her son assisted.

IT was a picture-perfect death -- an elderly woman, surrounded by her family, drifting peacefully into her final slumber. At least, that's how "Compassion in Dying," a Portland-based pro-euthanasia group, portrayed the first acknowledged death last week under Oregon's recently implemented physician-assisted suicide law.For a few days, the euthanasia movement could bask in some good publicity, as newspapers around the country reported the fate of the octogenarian,...

SAN FRANCISCO -- Dr. Robert Brody offers his verdict on the verdict: "It didn't change a thing."In the days before the Supreme Court's June ruling on assisted suicide there was a kind of hush among ethicists and lawyers waiting for word from on high. You could have heard a pin drop. But this pin must have dropped on a feather pillow.In upholding the ban on assisted suicide, the Supreme Court turned the debate back to the states. The court virtually urged Americans to continue what Chief Justice William Rehnquist described as "an earnest and profound debate about the morality, legality and practicality of physician-assisted suicide."

In a Baltimore neighborhood of simple brick houses, where geraniums edge the lawns in cheery bursts of pink and red, an old woman is dying. On a sweltering summer afternoon, she is in bed, frail and frightened, waiting for her doctor to arrive.A white Mazda pulls up, and the doctor, Timothy Keay, emerges carrying a blue nylon satchel, the modern equivalent of the black bag. Keay, an associate professor of family medicine at the University of Maryland, is a rarity in this impersonal, technological era: a doctor who makes house calls.

BOSTON -- So there is no last right for the dying. No right to doctor-assisted suicide. Not in the Constitution. Not in the Supreme Court's view. Not yet.In a ruling as sober as its subject, all nine justices refused to accept the notion that assisted suicide was a fundamental liberty for the terminally ill. They rejected the argument that aid-in-dying embodied the ''right to determine the time and manner of one's death,'' or the ''liberty to choose how...

Opponents and supporters of physician-assisted suicide agreed yesterday on this: The Supreme Court, which found no constitutional right to a doctor's help in ending life, has focused attention where it belongs - on the needs of dying patients.And a debate on the issue can only help improve medical care for the dying, who too often suffer with pain and fear of abandonment, experts on both sides say."This issue is now at the forefront," said Dr. Fred Marcus, a Redwood City, Calif. oncologist who supports helping the small percentage of patients who beg him to assist them in suicide.

WASHINGTON -- The Constitution gives no one the right to have a doctor's help in committing suicide, a unanimous Supreme Court ruled yesterday.The historic ruling was perhaps the most significant one on individual rights in decades. It did leave the terminally ill the option of obtaining pain-easing drugs in doses that could hasten death, so long as the drugs are not prescribed explicitly to cause death.Speaking in bland, mostly legalistic terms on a deeply emotional issue, the court rejected any claim that the Constitution includes "a right to commit suicide which includes a right to assistance in doing so."

WASHINGTON -- Concerned that some terminally ill Americans may be suffering needlessly, a federal advisory board called yesterday for medical reforms to improve those patients' care and relieve their chronic pain.In its report, the panel said the medical community is poorly trained to provide pain relief, to let the terminally ill manage the dying process and to comfort patients in their final days."We still have a real problem in this country with untreated pain," the chairwoman of the panel, Dr. Christine Cassel of Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York, said at a news conference.

AMSTERDAM -- It began with the oddest of rallying cries. People started talking about the "right to die" as if dying were not an inevitable human condition.By the 1970s we had seen more than our share of people tied, tubed, and plugged in to a semblance of life. Gradually some began to wave the banner of patients' rights and reclaim power from medical technology and technocrats playing doctor.But somewhere along the way the right-to-die movement went from asking about stopping treatment to asking for a doctor's help in dying.