Mercy's Friend or Foe?

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It is unlikely that lawmakers in Michigan would have acted had Kevorkian not forced their hand. When his sixth client, a 45-year-old cancer patient, came to Michigan to consult with him and killed herself on Nov. 23, the bill that had stalled swiftly sailed through the legislature in less than 10 days, on overwhelming votes in both the upper and lower chambers. "It's just the outright assisting in a killing that this bill will prohibit," says representative Joseph Palamara, a Democratic state legislator from Wyandotte. "It doesn't affect whatsoever doctors who withhold or withdraw food."

In fact the law will indeed affect other doctors, because Kevorkian's crusade has in some way touched them all. In recent years the leaders of the hospice movement, specialists in pain management and depression, have been transforming the dying process, much as the natural-childbirth movement did to childbearing over the past generation. In a sense they are racing against the radicals. Once they can offer a more gentle and dignified alternative to either a life ground down by pain or a death in a high-tech hell, the demand for Dr. Kevorkian's service will disappear.