Dr. Arthur Caplan is Director for the Center of Bioethics, Philadelphia. Well, I'm certainly more in the camp of critics, worry warts, nay-sayers. I find myself looking at the kind of people that have come to Dr. Kevorkian and recoiling at the idea that a Janet Adkins or a Sherry Miller or a Marjorie Wantz could have been helped to die as the best option that the system could give them. It's not that I think I can't be given cases individually where I would say yes. I can hardly say that my ethics lead me to absolute opposition in believing that it is immoral.
People think now, they're facing a system that's trying to ration.
That is mere hint of what is to come. As the baby boomers begin to move into their older years and begin to really stress the system, they put resource demands on it. Not that we're going to have a government dictating, you must die, that suddenly within the society, the notion will come that the older and disabled who are expensive should do the responsible thing and leave. Well, I think Kevorkian is in some ways going to wind up in one of the states that legalize, maybe that will be Michigan, maybe it will be another one. He may find himself involved in certain types of right to die movements, but I think he'll continue to push where he's shown us he wants to go.