Final Exit ‘dicey business’

This story was published February 15, 2006.

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Ted Goodwin

ASSISTED SUICIDE

• For complete coverage and the latest news on the assisted-suicide cases and the Final Exit Network, go to ajc.com/suicide.

Ted Goodwin, a twice-married Cobb County father of three, is an avid camper and backpacker who collects antique porcelain and likes to cook.

He will also tell you how to kill yourself.

Goodwin, the president of Final Exit Network, an emerging national right-to-die organization, gets the dichotomy: Why would a soft-spoken 59-year-old Kennesaw father devote himself to such an unpleasant task?

Everyone in the right-to-die movement has a story that explains his or her involvement, Goodwin said. In his case, he watched his father die after an agonizing 10-year battle with emphysema. “That made me decide to get active, ” he said.

Goodwin doesn’t want anybody else to suffer like his father did unless they choose to. That led him to join the now-defunct Hemlock Society and then to help found Final Exit Network 18 months ago.

Final Exit’s 1,500 dues-paying members believe that a person with an unbearable, unrelenting illness should be allowed to commit suicide if he chooses, in the place and manner he desires.

So far, Goodwin said, 36 people who have been counseled by Final Exit have chosen to “hasten their death.”

“We won’t help you die, ” he said. “We will support you in your death.”

It’s a distinction, he acknowledges, that a court may some day be asked to review.

Opponents of the right-to-die movement don’t see anything dignified or empowering in suicide. They view it as abandonment.

“It’s a false mercy, ” said Deirdre McQuade, spokeswoman for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. “It offers a double message that the person is not worthy of being with us any longer.”

What’s needed, McQuade said, is better pain management, greater care of the individual and true companionship at the end.

Goodwin agrees with that, to a point. He admits that supporting people considering suicide isn’t easy.

“It would drive you crazy if you didn’t separate your emotions and your bonding with these people from their decision” to die, he said. “You have to compartmentalize.”

The right-to-die issue made headlines again last month, when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld an Oregon law allowing doctors to prescribe lethal drug overdoses to terminally ill patients. Oregon is the only state that allows physician-assisted suicide.

A person’s right to die was an even hotter topic in the 1990s when Jack Kevorkian, nicknamed “Dr. Death, ” used a homemade “suicide machine” that aided dozens of suicides in Michigan, a decade after the Hemlock Society was founded to advocate the right to die.

In 1999, Kevorkian was convicted of second-degree murder for giving a lethal drug injection to a man suffering from Lou Gehrig’s disease in 1998. A videotape of the death was shown on television’s “60 Minutes.” Kevorkian is now in prison and in poor health.

Goodwin won’t say what method Final Exit Network’s patients use to commit suicide. Lawrence Egbert, a physician and professor at Johns Hopkins University and the medical director of Final Exit, said the person committing suicide “should do all the chores.”

Goodwin is serious in tone while discussing the subject, and scholarly in appearance, thanks to salt-and-pepper hair and beard and eyeglasses that dangle from his neck. Despite the grim subject of his cause, he is engaging in conversation as he sips red wine and espresso following a lunch of focaccia and risotto in downtown Atlanta.

Semi-retired from his business of providing employee medical testing for companies, he now spends much of his time at a second home in Florida.

His wife, Marilyn, who said her husband’s involvement in the right-to-die movement “has raised my consciousness, ” laughed when asked whether his cause seems normal to her. “We don’t just bring up the subject anywhere, ” she said. “We’re not standing on the street corners preaching.”

But Goodwin does make his share of speeches promoting the right to die.

“He’s got that conviction and the firmness and ethical philosophy which supports him, ” said Derek Humphry, founder of the Hemlock Society, who helped popularize the right-to-die issue with his best-selling book, “Final Exit.” Humphry called Goodwin a driving force in the movement.

Goodwin does not expect national legislation passed in his lifetime that would support a person’s right to die. He hopes that Final Exit can, through its efforts, further legitimize the idea and show the need, paving the way for that day.

“My philosophy is, if I don’t do it, who will?” Goodwin said. “I’m not afraid to stand up and be counted. I believe that most Americans do believe in this.”

Legal or not, the right-to-die position rankles groups such as Not Dead Yet, a national disability rights organization that opposes legalized assisted suicide and sees the movement as an attack on people with disabilities.

“The loss of dignity, the loss of autonomy they talk about [as reasons for suicide] really are disability issues, ” said Diane Coleman, president of Not Dead Yet, based in Forest Park, Ill. “The role of others should be to say, ‘We value you, we want to help you, ’ not ‘If I were you I’d want to die, too.’ “

Goodwin said he spends a lot of time explaining what his organization will not do for patients.

Final Exit is not for people “who are suicidal because they are off their meds, ” he said. And, “We don’t serve people who are teenagers who’ve just had their girlfriends break up with them. We’re serving people who have conditions that are degenerative, progressive, hopeless in their outcome and who don’t feel they can go on any further.”

That might include people suffering from multiple sclerosis, muscular dystrophy or Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s or Lou Gehrig’s disease. They don’t have to be medically terminal or in pain.

Risk of prosecution

Final Exit has a volunteer staff of 50 counselors, including psychiatrists, other physicians, psychologists and a minister. They screen and counsel suicide candidates, who, Goodwin said, are never solicited.

And suicide, he stressed, is only one option that is presented. “We want them to explore all those other options, obviously, ” he said.

If a person has a physical condition considered unbearable, suicide is discussed with her and she is instructed on how to kill herself “painlessly and efficiently.”

In addition to the 36 people who have committed suicide after being counseled by Final Exit, several dozen more have been approved by the organization to take action should they choose.

Goodwin said he has personally been present at the deaths of 12 people who came to Final Exit. He stressed that, unlike Kevorkian, Final Exit members do not assist directly in the person’s death. That, Goodwin said, would be illegal. But telling people how to kill themselves, he said, is constitutionally protected under the right of free speech.

Nevertheless, Goodwin expects that his group will someday become a target of law enforcement.

“It depends on the inclination of the prosecutor, ” he said. “We feel there will be a prosecution based on political reasons. It’s pretty dicey business. We try to stay under the radar screen. But we are willing to take that risk to do the compassionate work that needs to be done.”