Columnist Tom Utley in the UK Daily Mail says he’s wary of Debbie Purdy’s efforts to challenge Britain’s assisted suicide law. Purdy (left, celebrating court victory with husband Omar Puente) has multiple sclerosis and says she plans to kill herself at Dignitas, a controversial euthanasia clinic in Switzerland. She says she wants to make sure that her husband will not be prosecuted if he aids her in making arrangements for assisted suicide.

Utley thinks Purdy is really trying to legalize assisted suicide in Britain — a prospect he finds alarming.

In the Netherlands, MPs voted in 2000 to legalise euthanasia, assuring the world: ‘This is only for people who are in great pain and have no prospect of recovery.’

Within three years, more than one per cent of all deaths in Holland were being deliberately inflicted by doctors.

We saw the same phenomenon here with abortion. When it was legalised in 1967, we were assured it would be carried out only if continuing the pregnancy would mean risk to the life or mental health of the mother, risk to the physical or mental health of existing children or ’substantial’ risk of the child being born ’seriously handicapped’.

Today, abortion is widely seen simply as an alternative to contraception, and 500 fetuses are killed every day. Do we really want to go down that road with euthanasia?

If so, how long will it be before doctors start bumping off old women like my grandmother, who say they want to die but don’t really mean it?

Related story: Woman wins right to review of law on assisted suicide

From Reuters:

A survey commissioned by ELDR magazine found that over 80 percent of Americans surveyed believe the choice to end one’s life is a personal decision.Two-thirds said they favor the legalization of physician-assisted suicide. Nearly half of the 1,000 people polled said they could eventually become the primary caregiver to elderly family members or friends. The survey was conducted by Knowledge Networks.

Survey results here.

Time magazine, BBC, [UK] Telegraph:

Just two days after a French court rejected her request for doctor-assisted suicide, 52-year-old Chantale Sebire was found dead in her home this week. Sebire had argued that a rare and painful facial tumor had made her life unbearable. An initial investigation concluded that she had died from something other than natural causes.

Sebire’s death stirred debate over French laws prohibiting euthanasia for people with terminal diseases.

Associated Press report in Oregonlive.com:

The number of Oregonians who used the state’s assisted suicide law rose to its highest level in 2007, its tenth year in effect.

According to a report released Tuesday by the Oregon Department of Human Services, more people are getting the lethal prescriptions allowed under the Death with Dignity Act, but as in the past, not all take them.

The report shows that 85 people got the prescriptions in 2007, up by 20 from the year before. And 49 people died under the terms of the law, up by three from the year before.

Oregon’s law allows terminally ill, mentally competent adults to give themselves a life-ending medication prescribed by a physician. Oregon is the only state in the nation with such a law.

From the Oakland [MI] Press and the Associated Press:

Jack Kevorkian, released from prison last year after serving eight years for second-degree murder, picked up petitions to run for Congress from Michigan’s 9th District.

A retired pathologist, Kevorkian claims to have assisted in the suicides of at least 130 people from 1990 until 1998. Kevorkian, 79, was convicted in the death of Thomas Youk, which he filmed and had broadcast on CBS’ “60 Minutes.”

“We need some honesty and sincerity instead of corrupt government in Washington,” Kevorkian said.

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By Ranjana Srivastava in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) (registration required): A first-person piece about a doctor’s encounter with a terminal cancer patient who asks for help in planning her death. The interaction is disturbing for the doctor precisely because she finds the patient’s request so reasonable.

I am stunned by her cold logic yet captivated by its lucidity. She is thinking aloud what has crossed the minds of anyone, physician or patient, who has witnessed the trail of emotional and physical destruction that a terminal illness often lays down.

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Cover story by Daniel Bergner in the New York Times Magazine: (login required)

Cover headline: Booth Gardner is a 71-year-old former governor of Washington State running one last campaign: To let people — including someday people like him, with Parkinson’s or other debilitating nonterminal diseases — take their own lives. The next assisted suicide could be even more morally fraught.

His son is among those fighting him every step of the way.