The American Medical Association and Physician-Assisted Suicide
In June 1993, Dr. Jack Kevorkian had assisted in the suicides of sixteen persons (Gibbs 1993, 34). At that time, a new organization, Compassion in Dying, had been formed in Seattle to promote assisted suicide and to screen patients and then instruct them in the most effective way to take a lethal dose of drugs to accomplish that end (New Group Offers to Help the Ill Commit Suicide 1993, 32). “California Proposition 161” proposing to establish assisted suicide by statute had failed 46 percent to 54 percent in November 1992. However, in Oregon, a coalition of groups was organizing to place an assisted-suicide initiative on the November 1994 ballot (Groups Draft Rightto-die Initiative 1993, 2C). At its June 1993 annual meeting, the American Medical Association (AMA) referred to its board leadership a resolution calling for a study of “the scope and contextual variables of patient requests for euthanasia/assisted suicides” (American Medical Association, Medical Student Section 1993, 460). In response, the AMA Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs (CEJA) presented Report 8-I-93 “Physician Assisted Suicide,” recommendations of which the AMA adopted in December 1993 (American Medical Association, Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs [AMACEJA] 1994, 263–67). Since that time, AMA ethics policy has definitively stated that “Physician-assisted suicide is fundamentally inconsistent with the physician’s role as healer” (AMACEJA 2017, 84). In June 2016, this AMA policy opposing physician-assisted suicide was technically reaffirmed in an omnibus format when the AMA accepted the CEJA report to modernize the Opinions in the Code of Medical Ethics (AMACEJA 2016, 165–67). Noting the limitations of an omnibus process, CEJA stated that “the council is prepared to address concerns about existing Opinions, some of which have been in the code for decades, through the resolution process” (AMACEJA 2016, 165). In that same meeting, the AMA House of Delegates rejected a resolution from Louisiana which stated: