Democrat
George Eighmey helps people kill themselves, from showing them how to fill out the paperwork required by Oregon’s assisted suicide law to handing them a final glass full of lethal “medication.” He has, by his own count, watched two dozen people kill themselves.
“That’s chilling,” says Dr. Kenneth Stevens, a cancer doctor for 38 years, who doesn’t share Mr. Eighmey’s enthusiasm for suicide. “I went into medicine to take care of patients, not to harm them,” Dr. Stevens told Catholic San Francisco. “Assisted suicide is the ultimate abandonment of the patient.”
Mr. Eighmey, a former state legislator, is executive director of Compassion in Dying of Oregon. His organization “handles roughly 80 to 85 percent” of the people who kill themselves under the terms of Oregon’s “Death With Dignity” law, he says. The law, an initiative known as Measure 16, took effect in late 1997.
Dr. Stevens, chair of radiation oncology at the Oregon Health and Sciences University, is president of Physicians for Compassionate Care, a group whose mission is to preserve the doctor’s traditional role as healer and to “speak out for the inherent value of human life.”