On July 4, 1995, Myrna Lebov, age 52, committed suicide in her Manhattan apartment. The case generated national headlines when her husband, George Delury, announced publicly that he had assisted Lebov's suicide at her request because she was suffering the debilitations of progressive multiple sclerosis.
As has happened in similar cases in the United Kingdom, Delury became an instant celebrity. Far and wide, he was acclaimed as a dedicated husband willing to risk jail to help his beloved wife achieve her deeply desired end to suffering. The case stimulated calls for legalization, a cause Delury pushed in numerous television appearances. He signed a book deal, later published under the title But What If She Wants to Die? Delury soon entered a plea bargain and served a mere few months in jail.
Had Delury acted in England or Wales today—rather than in New York in 1995—he almost surely would not have been prosecuted at all. Even though assisted suicide remains a crime, newly published British Department of Public Prosecution guidelines effectively decriminalized some categories of assisted suicide. If assisted suicides are committed by people with a "terminal illness," a "severe and incurable disability," or "a severe degenerative physical condition"—whether occurring overseas or in country—the assister was a close friend or relative of the deceased and motivated by compassion, and the victim "had a clear, settled, and informed wish to commit suicide," among other criteria, prosecution is deemed not "in the public interest."
What do these guidelines teach us about assisted suicide? First, the agenda is not really about terminal illness: It is about fear and loathing of disability and the debilitation of advanced age. What else explains why a husband assisting the suicide of his wife, who wanted to die because their son became a quadriplegic, would be prosecuted under the guidelines—but he wouldn't face charges for the assisting the suicide of the son?
Second, the guidelines prove that assisted suicide is not a medical act. Nothing in the guidelines requires a physician's review or participation.
Third, the court ruling and following guidelines illustrate how the rule of law is crumbling. What matters most today is not principle, but emotion-driven personal narratives.
Perhaps most alarmingly, decriminalizing assisted suicide—but only when the victim had a terminal or disabling condition—sends the insidious societal message that the lives of such people are not as worthy of protecting as those of others. In this sense, the guidelines are a profound abandonment of society's most vulnerable citizens, exposing at least some to the acute danger of being coerced into death by relatives or friends.
For proof, we need only turn again to George Delury, whose claims of compassion were eventually dashed on the rocks. Perhaps because he was planning to write a book, he kept a computer diary of the events leading up to Lebov's death—and it proved that George Delury put Myrna Lebov out of his misery.
The diary showed that Lebov did not have an unwavering and long-stated desire to die, as Delury had claimed. Rather, as often happens with people struggling with debilitating illnesses, her moods waxed and waned. One day she would be suicidal—but the next day she was reengaged in life. Moreover, Delury encouraged his wife to kill herself, or as he put it, "to decide to quit."
That wasn't all. Delury worked assiduously at destroying his wife's will to live by making her feel like a worthless burden. On March 28, 1995, Delury wrote in his diary that he planned to tell his wife:
I have work to do, people to see, places to travel. But no one asks about my needs. I have fallen prey to the tyranny of a victim. You are sucking my life out of my [sic] like a vampire and nobody cares. In fact, it would appear that I am about to be cast in the role of villain because I no longer believe in you."
Delury later admitted that he had shown his wife that very passage.
On June 10, Delury's diary entry described an argument with Lebov that started when she left a message to her niece that "things are looking splendid":
I blew up! … I told Myrna that she had hurt me very badly, not my feelings, but physically and emotionally…I put it to Myrna bluntly—‘If you won't take care of me, I won't take care of you.'"
Once the contents of his diary were publicly revealed, Delury's defense of "compassion" became inoperable, which was why he accepted the plea bargain. But that still wasn't the end of the story. In But What if She Wants to Die—published when after he became constitutionally immune from further prosecution—Delury wrote that he had not just assisted Lebov's suicide, but smothered her with a plastic bag because he was worried that the drugs she ingested might not be sufficient to kill her. (Delury died at his own hand in 2003 at the age of 74.)
Thanks to the assisted suicide guidelines, potential Myrna Lebovs are at the mercy of future George Delurys. And these Delurys know full well, that so long as they don't keep inculpating diaries, they will have little trouble convincing prosecutors that their motive was compassion, a claim readily believed in a society so fearful and disdainful of disability.
And don't think the same think can't happen here. Recall that in the 1990s, juries repeatedly exonerated Jack Kevorkian for assisting the suicide of mostly despairing disabled people. Indeed, the Public Prosecutor of Oakland County, MI first ran for office on the plank of leaving Kevorkian alone, which, when he won, also effectively decriminalized assisted suicide.
All of this brings to mind the sad 1994 commentary by the Canadian newspaper columnist Andrew Coyne. Reacting to the widespread public support of Robert Latimer, who murdered his twelve-year-old daughter because she was disabled by cerebral palsy, Coyne concluded: "A society that believes in nothing can offer no argument even against death. A culture that has lost its faith in life cannot comprehend why it should be endured." Thankfully, this week 125 Orthodox, Catholic and Evangelical leaders united to sign the Manhattan Declaration, a document that declares as one of its core beliefs the sanctity of all life. Chuck Colson called it "one of the most important documents produced by the American church, at least in my lifetime".
Alas, in the last 15 years, Coyne's observation has only gone from bad to worse.
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