DUTCH EUTHANASIA: THE DREAM AND THE NIGHTMARE.

Tuesdays with Morrie, which recounts conversations between author Mitch Albom and Morrie, his former professor who was dying of Lou Gehrig's disease (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis--ALS), has been on the New York Times Bestseller List for years. There is a reason. In a time in which dying people are too often devalued and isolated--malignly turned into a "them," almost as if having a terminal illness is something about which to be ashamed - - Albom presented Morrie as a man who remained to the end fully alive and engaged - - always and ever "us" in the truest sense of the word.

How disheartening, then, that the author would use his notoriety as a writer and thinker about death and dying to promote and extol in almost breathless terms the legalization of euthanasia in the Netherlands. (Detroit Free Press, "Terminally Ill People Know What Is Best for Them," December 3, 2000.)

Euthanasia, by definition, devalues those whom it is supposed to serve by expressly proclaiming that there are some among us whose lives are so degraded and undignified that their lives are no longer worth protecting. Albom does a profound disservice to terminally ill, disabled, and despairing people everywhere in supporting euthanasia as a general concept, and in accepting whole cloth the utter nonsense that in actual practice Dutch "protective guidelines" prevent abuse against the vulnerable.

Lest you think I overstate the case, consider this. Assume that your sister asks her psychiatrist to kill her because her two children have died, one from disease and one from suicide. She has become obsessed about being buried between them.

Toward that end, she has purchased a cemetery plot and buried her children there, one on each side of her own awaiting grave. Rather than treat her and attempt to overcome her suicidal ideation, the psychiatrist interviews your sister four times over five weeks and then does the dark deed as requested because, in Albom's words, he believes that suffering people "know what is best for them." Not only would you consider the psychiatrist to have profoundly abandoned and betrayed your sister but you would probably sue him for malpractice!

That would not sit well with the Dutch Supreme Court. You see, these were the exact facts in the killing of a grieving mother named Hilly Boscher, euthanized in 1991 by her Dutch psychiatrist. Rather than punish the psychiatrist for facilitating the death instead of trying to save the life of his suicidal patient, the Dutch Supreme Court essentially applauded his actions, ruling that there is no difference between physical and emotional suffering when justifying euthanasia.

This case is not an anomaly. The "merciful" Dutch euthanasia system is rife with such documented stories of people discarded rather than compassionately being cared for during their darkest hour. For example, there was the young woman in remission from anorexia nervosa depicted in a Dutch pro-euthanasia documentary shown in the United States on PBS. She was so worried about returning to food abuse that she asked her doctor to kill her. On screen, she tells the doctor, "I've thought about dying day and night, and I know that if relief [death] does not come, I will return to the old pattern of self punishment, hurting myself. I know it. I feel it and therefore I hope the release will come soon and I die."