Assisted Suicide Controversy

It came as a great disappointment to learn (“Administration Asks Court to Reject Assisted Suicide,” Nov. 13) that Solicitor General Walter Dellinger had urged the justices of the Supreme Court to reject the right of terminally ill patients to request and receive physician aid in dying to end their suffering.

His argument that the “right to die” could easily be abused is correct only if there would be no provisions for safeguards.

The Natural Death Act, which allows for the removal of life sustaining mechanisms, and the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act, which permits the donation of human organs for medical transplantation, are both laws that could have had a great potential for abuse. Yet, throughout the years there has never been a controversy regarding their abuse.

Physician aid in dying for the terminally ill is no exception. A well-written law with careful safeguards can and will keep us safe from abuse while it provides us with the ultimate in civil rights--the right to choose when our suffering becomes so severe that life becomes a nightmare and death becomes a blessing.

ROY T. KOBAYASHI

Fullerton

* I have watched helplessly as several loved ones have struggled while cancer slowly devoured their bodies like maggots on a dead bird. However, these people were not yet dead but certainly not living.

These incidents moved me profoundly and forced me to examine my own mortality. I questioned God’s intentions and realized that God wanted me to help myself. I now feel I have the right to choose when I want to die unless God or fate makes that choice for me first. I consider it a part of my doctor’s obligation to assist me in my choice. If I am unable to communicate my desire, I have signed an advance directive (a living will and a medical power of attorney).

God has given me a body and a mind that feels both pleasure and pain. I am the only one who can know when my pain is unbearable and life is torture. When pain becomes my life it’s time to go! And then God will deal with my spirit!

JEAN FLEMING

Studio City

The writer has been a member of Ethics Committee of Valley Presbyterian Hospital for 10 years.