Posted on 05/26/2011 11:12:47 AM PDT by wagglebee
From a cluttered Baltimore apartment office, Dr. Lawrence Egbert says he has helped direct the deaths of nearly 300 people across the country.
Some of his patients, as he calls them, are racked with cancer, paralyzed or staring down Alzheimer's. Others simply want to slip away on their own terms. Sometimes family members gather around the bedside to say goodbye; in other cases, their appointed "exit guides" lock the door behind them and make arrangements for someone to stumble across the body.
A decade after Jack Kevorkian went to prison for helping a man with Lou Gehrig's disease commit suicide, Egbert, 83, has been dubbed "The New Doctor Death" by Newsweek after being criminally charged in two states for his role as medical director for the Final Exit Network. An Arizona jury acquitted him last month following a three-week trial in the death of a Phoenix woman. He has also been charged in Georgia.
The cases have revived the debate over assisted suicide and placed Egbert, a retired anesthesiologist, at the forefront of the debate over Americans' right to take their own lives. The Final Exit Network is the only known group performing such work, and members say their assistance is compassionate and progressive. Prosecutors call them "killers." Even other right-to-die advocates, including Kevorkian himself, disagree with their methods.
Amid the controversy, Egbert has been dismissed from his role teaching classes at the Johns Hopkins University and has had a falling-out with his church. After snapping his pelvis in a bicycle accident, he even contemplated taking his own life. But should he prevail in his pending case in Georgia, Egbert said, he'll resume his work with the Final Exit Network.
(Excerpt) Read more at baltimoresun.com ...
A group that is even too evil for Kevorkian.
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Some doctors like to play God. Some think they are God. More and more all the time regrettably.
Tele-euthanasia?
This is sick beyond belief.
You just don’t barge in on God.
Now they prey upon the mentally ill.
One of their victims was a 58 year old mentally ill woman in good health. What ghouls.
I am afraid Obamacare will put us on this path on a larger scale.
If those bent on suicide just took the responsibility for their act upon themselves, it wouldn’t be such a public horror. But they somehow want to get the “guidance” of medicine to do the ludicrously simple task of self asphyxiation. This is somehow supposed to take the shamefulness away.
I swear I once read/heard that Eskimo elders, if they felt as though they were becoming a burden on their family/community, were known to walk off into the wilderness never to be heard from again. I searched the web looking for any citations on this but found nothing. This certainly would classify as suicide but at the same time would it not be an honorable act of selflessness?
Just wow.
There is NOTHING selfless about this.
What it describes is a society that doesn't value human life and ingrains a sense of there being a "duty to die" if someone thinks they are a "burden" on society.
It is no different from other societies that didn't value human life and used gas chambers, forced starvation and mass execution on people they think are a "burden" to society.
I heard they were put on an ice floe and drifted off to never reappear.
The Japanese have a set of suicide customs for their elders
I don’t understand the attitude that the elderly should go off and die somewhere. What kind of people would wish this on their parents and grandparents? Sociopaths?
All society is decaying. Who needs Hitler when we have soft tyranny? Dead is dead either way.
*8A decade after Jack Kevorkian went to prison**
Will this man go to prison too?
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