Geoffrey Fieger, the attorney who represents Dr. Jack Kevorkian, defended assisted suicide as being "simply right" in his speech on Friday.
Kevorkian is a former Michigan pathologist who has gained notoriety in the last six years for assisting the suicides of more than 40 known patients, defending what many call the "right to die."
Fieger gave a speech, titled "The Prosecution and Persecution of Dr. Kevorkian and Right Not to Suffer," before more than 100 people and several television cameras in Collis Commonground.
"If we're talking about rights at all, we're talking about the rights not to suffer, to be free from governmental regulation," he said.
Fieger said he thinks the term "right to die" is inappropriate.
"I'm standing up for some little Armenian doctor ... who is standing up for the rights of each and every one of us ... about how long we have to suffer," Fieger said.
"When you know the way you are going to go is to choke on your own spit when your neuromuscular system fails, don't you want to say 'I want to die in my own way?'" he asked.
"Some of us aren't going so gently into that good night," Fieger said. "What Kevorkian stands for is the idea that mentally competent adults have the right to decide when to go into that good night."
Fieger said he and Kevorkian are not "some sort of social do-gooders or activists," but instead they think assisted suicide is "simply right -- people intuitively feel it."
He said more than 70 percent of Americans support assisted suicide.
Since he embarked on Kevorkian's case in 1990, Fieger said he has found several opponents to assisted suicide.
He said one such opponent is apathy, because many people believe assisted suicide is right, but no one is standing up for it.
Another opponent, he said, is the "religious radical right" -- the "right-to-life" movement.
Fieger said the religious right has worked its way into state governments, and he called its members "people who God and Jesus are speaking to through the fillings of their teeth."
"Priests don't tell architects what is ethical," Fieger said. "Why do they invade into medicine?"
Another opponent to assisted suicide, Feiger said, are the intellectuals who talk about the "slippery slope" and the possible progression of assisted suicide.
He said the slippery slope argument could be used to defend anything -- from people having drivers licenses to owning guns.
Fieger said suicide is not a crime in any state, "so how can assisting it be a crime?"
Fieger often compared assisted suicide to abortion. He said they are the only two areas of medicine where the law has invaded.
"This issue is simpler," he said. "Assisted suicide doesn't involve the third party of the fetus."
He spoke about the 1972 abortion case of Roe v. Wade.
"How did abortion all of a sudden become ethical overnight?" he asked.
Fieger said opponents to assisted suicide have tried to use the argument that "doctors will become killers." But he said when abortion opponents said mothers would become killers, "no one bought it."
Fieger criticized members of the medical profession for "rarely" standing up for controversial issues.
He said no doctors publicly supported birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger and John Scopes, the schoolteacher prosecuted for teaching evolution.
Fieger compared assisted suicide, or active euthanasia, to passive euthanasia, or "pulling the plug" on a brain dead patient.
"Is it ethical to pull a feeding tube and starve someone to death for 15 days?" he asked, referring to Nancy Cruzan, a patient in a famous passive euthanasia case.
He said the practice of passive euthanasia is more easily corruptible than assisted suicide because passive euthanasia is based on a "piece of paper" signed by a patient possibly years before, while a patient makes a conscious decision to have active euthanasia.
