An Uncertain Future for Assisted Suicide

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The defeat of Proposal B by Michigan voters on November 3 was not a surprise. Merian's Friends, the group sponsoring this measure to legalize physician-assisted suicide for the seriously ill, was outmatched in funding and organization. Citizens for Compassionate Care united dozens of medical, religious, right-to-life, and other groups in a well-funded campaign to persuade voters that Proposal B was dangerously flawed as public policy.

More surprising, perhaps, was the margin of defeat. Proposal B lost in every one of Michigan's eighty-three counties, including those which supported Jack

Kevorkian's attorney Geoffrey Fieger in his failed bid to be governor; in all but 14 counties it lost by more than a two-to-one margin, in a state where public opinion was said to favor assisted suicide. …