By Dave Andrusko
In some ways it’s a rather strange headline: “After the death of Jack Kevorkian, Lawrence Egbert is the new public face of American assisted suicide.”
The Washington Post’s Manuel Roig-Franzia tells us that Egbert, formerly the medical director of the Final Exit Network, is not a publicity hound, like the eccentric Kevorkian who died last June.
Moreover, Egbert is at odds with the current leadership of FEN, either because they are not as aggressive/reckless as Egbert, and/or are unnerved by the two deaths that led to trials against FEN, “a loosely knit group that claims 3,000 dues-paying members,” according to Roig-Franzia. (The yet-to-take place second trial was spurred by the death of a man in Georgia, which culminated in Egbert and three other FEN leaders “all [being] arrested on charges of assisting in a suicide, tampering with evidence and racketeering.”)
It takes the reader probably 20 minutes to read Roig-Franzia’s lengthy profile of a man Newsweek once called “the New Jack Kevorkian.” But it takes only about three minutes to grasp that the reporter is obviously taken with Egbert whom he sees as quieter and more reflective than the always boisterous and confrontational Kevorkian. Roig-Franzia writes lyrically,
“I expect to find an absolutist, a proselytizer for a cause, when I first drive to Baltimore to meet Lawrence Egbert. Instead, I encounter a man whose zeal is tempered by self-doubt.
“’Once I am a true believer, that’s the time I should quit,’ he says one afternoon. ‘I never get used to it. I’m not used to it now.’”
Stephen Drake, head of the disability rights organization, “Not Dead Yet” is less enthralled. In a blog he posted that ran after the Post profiled Egbert last weekend and then provided him with a live chat online, Drake called FEN “the assisted suicide vigilante cult” (http://notdeadyetnewscommentary.blogspot.com/2012/01/former-medical-director-of-final-exit.html).
Here are just a few highlights gleaned from the 5,821-word-long piece that ran in the Washington Post’s Style section.
* “Egbert has estimated that he approved 95 percent of applications.”
* “Egbert is also willing, in extreme cases, he says, to serve as an ‘exit guide’ for patients who have suffered from depression for extended periods of time.”
* “Egbert is an original member of the network and remembers heated debates in 2004 when the group was formed at meetings in Chicago. Egbert participated by phone, arguing that they should take patients with long-term depression who did not respond to treatment.
“Earl Wettstein, an advertising executive who served as the network’s first president, opposed because he thought taking depression cases would push ‘the envelope beyond our original intent. … It was a matter of it was hard to diagnose, and, to me, it was not a terminal or life-ending condition.’ He lost the argument and resigned in protest.”
* Asked in the online chat what about Alzheimer’s, Egbert cautiously answered, “Complicated.” He went on, however, to add, “Patients with Alzheimer’s have a time when they are (hopefully) reasonable and we warn them that there is a window of opportunity that will close some time and I do not predict when.”
Half way through, you read about Egbert’s father whose sunny disposition was “changed by his experiences on the military prosecution team at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals.” According to Roig-Franzia,
“The father’s experiences prompted the son’s curiosity. The younger Egbert fixated on the appalling actions of Nazi doctors, especially the experiments they had conducted, such as immersing inmates in ice water or injecting them with poisons.
“’Most of them thought it was justified,’ Egbert says one afternoon. ‘Some of them were delighted by it.’”
Roig-Franzia adds,
“Egbert weighed the choices that Nazi doctors made — choices that eventually led to unspeakable evils — against the choices he made.
“’It makes me suspicious of everything I do — that I might be doing something evil,’ he says. ‘I think about it a lot.’
“…He also wonders whether his own work could nudge society toward something awful.
“’I could be part of a slippery slope,’ he says, ‘to us becoming like Nazis — the Final Exit Network, and me as an individual.’”
To Roig-Franzia, this means that Egbert’s “zeal is tempered by self-doubt.”
I think Stephen Drake of “Not Dead Yet” is much closer to the truth.
“But what is it that marks someone as a zealot? Their manners and demeanor? Or their actions?
“I vote for actions – and by that standard both Egbert and Kevorkian more than qualify as zealots and fanatics, even if one of them is soft-spoken and polite.”
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