Word: euthanasia
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Julian Garmony, the Foreign Secretary, who is also present at the service. Linley and Halliday, unnerved by Molly's suffering before she died, make a pact. If one of them develops symptoms that could suddenly leave him helpless, the other will secure, without risking legal repercussions, the means for euthanasia. Apparently, that may be possible in Amsterdam...
...show wasn't pandering for ratings. "I have a low threshold for discomfort, and I was not made uncomfortable by the moment of death," he says. "I didn't see anybody writhing in agony. I didn't see anything that would make me turn my face away." With euthanasia being so hotly debated, he adds, "the story we put on the air, exactly as we told it, was a fit and proper one for 60 Minutes...
...dirty little secret about euthanasia is that it's common in hospitals, hospices and nursing homes even in the 49 states where it's illegal. It just isn't talked about. A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine this year found that 1 in 21 doctors surveyed had administered a lethal injection to end suffering. A doctor in the anonymous survey reported having done it 150 times...
...when I hear about euthanasia and Jack Kevorkian, sirens go off in my mind. Maybe I'm working with an old paradigm, like Munich, but I can't help it. I think of the case of Franz Stangl, a perfectly conventional Vienna policeman and good citizen who after the Anschluss became a security officer at hospitals for the aged, infirm and imbecilic, and helped--humanely at first, so they said--to ease the very worst cases, the utterly hopeless, the deformed and subhuman, toward a death that all reasonable people at the time thought would be the only decent thing...
...course, when the baby boomers themselves get up into the Kevorkian years, there may be interesting changes in their thinking. Alongside the euthanasia that some might be willing to visit on their parents (the end-of-life completion of the parricide they rehearsed when shouldering their elders aside in the '60s), they will no doubt devote themselves feverishly to bringing about miracles to extend their lives. Viagra was just the beginning. The boomers' will toward immortality is quite fierce and will eventually produce, though I will not be around to see them, hilarious tragedies...