Euthanasia Conference Prompts Controversy

Amid the clamor of Jiang Zemin's visit and somber skies, the Harvard International Conference on Euthanasia began Saturday.

The two-day conference covered issues surrounding care at the end of life--including health law, hospice and palliative care, physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia.

The conference attracted many distinguished speakers and took a step towards bringing this discussion into the light.

Akilesh Palanisamy '98, the director of the conference, said that the topic of euthanasia was chosen because it is an issue that is both topical and of growing importance in the long term.

"With the coming vote of the Supreme Court on the legality of physician assisted suicide this issue is very pertinent," he said. "Also, as technology advances, this issue will only become more important for society."

The conference was sponsored by the Harvard Hippocratic Society--an under graduate organization that "seeks to broaden student's understanding of important health care issues facing the world today."

The society publishes the Journal of the Hippocratic Society in conjunction with MIT. The journal published an issue for the conference titled "End of Life Care and Decision Making."

The attendants included professors, students, doctors and lawyers, Palanisamy said. About about 300 people attended the event, coming from locales such as Canada and the Netherlands, he said.

"Overall, I was very pleased with the turnout of the conference," Palanisamy said.

'Not Dead Yet'

Even before the first keynote address began, the conference was being protested by "Not Dead Yet"--an organization of disabled individuals who oppose euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide on political grounds.

Feeling discriminated against on the grounds of "ablism," the protesters said they felt that approving assisted suicide for the disabled would move the medical establishment's focus away from treatment.

"People would rather kill me than give me the care I need," said Carol Celeigh, one of the protesters and a student at Northwestern.

Palanisamy said that the organizers tried to accommodate the protesters throughout the conference.

"It is important that they were here, and we tried to include them in the discussion as much as possible," he said.

In the panel discussion of ethics, only one of the four panelists, Derek Humphry, the president of the Euthanasia Research and Guidance League, approved of euthanasia in practice.

Humphry, who founded the Hemlock Society, has been campaigning for lawful physician aid-in-dying for the terminally ill since 1978, when he helped his terminally ill wife to die.

Panelists and protesters both spoke out against Humphry for his support of euthanasia. Panelists said that physician assisted suicide would be either ineffective, dangerous or ethically wrong.

Sissela Bok, distinguished fellow of the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, said she felt that the desire of people to die was a symptom of the inadequate care that the current medical system supplies. She cited a study asserting that, "70 percent of those polled would prefer palliative care to euthanasia."

Bok said that Palliative care--treatment that alleviates pain and suffering without necessarily relieving the patient's medical condition--is a better solution that euthanasia, but is not made available under our medical system.

"Don't change our position on physician-assisted suicide until [we achieve] a better quality of care for all," she said. "There should never be medical treatment that does not pass muster as moral treatment as well."

Elements of this view was shared by other panelists, such as Lynn Peterson, the director of educational programs and clinical ethics at Harvard Medical School, and George Annas '67, chair of the health law department at the Boston University School of Public Health.

Peterson said he felt allowing doctors to consider suicide as an option for a patient would undermine their ability to cure that patient. This fear was especially present due to the huge hold profitability has in HMOs, he said.

"When you get to the issues where economic efficiency might dictate the end of life I get very worried," he said.

Peterson said euthanasia would be considered less desirable an option if there should be more availability of care for patients.

"We can get the technology easily, but it is hard to get the care," he said.

Annas said that less time should be spent discussing euthanasia and more should be devoted to improving the quality of care.

"The whole debate is a cry for help, a symptom," he said.

Annas used slides and humor to argue that the debate on euthanasia was too insignificant to deserve discussion.

"What's all this about the right to die? We're all going to die," he said. "That's one right that I would like to waive."

Attendants of the conference said they believed that the event allowed people on both sides of the debate to present their views.

"I was impressed by how they examined both sides of the issues," said Katrina Pignone, a student at the Extension School. "I've been to other conferences that were much more one-sided."

Michael P. Herman '00 said he found that the controversy was both unavoidable and perhaps beneficial.

"The first day really brought home the impact of the issue to me, especially when I saw the protesters," he said. "That together with the academic discussion made a great synthesis. You can't really even think about this issue and avoid the emotion inherent in it."