A Merciful End : The Euthanasia Movement in Modern America

Oxford Univ Pr, October 2002. Hardcover. New. Canadian historian Dowbiggin succeeds admirably in setting today's debate over physician-assisted suicide and the 'right to die' in the context of major intellectual and political trends of the twentieth century. Before World War I, the idea of euthanasia attracted progressive thinkers seeking to apply Darwinian science to social problems and moral issues once considered religion's domain. Theodore Roosevelt, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Helen Keller, and feminists such as Margaret Sanger (who equated 'death control' with birth control as essential to individual liberty) were among its prominent backers. Drawing on the movement's archives, the author traces the rise of the Euthanasia Society of America with its disquieting affinity for eugenics, its post-war transformation into the Society for the Right to Die, and its modern manifestations in Jack Kevorkian, Oregon's suicide initiative, and grassroots fears that medical advances will deprive Americans of death with dignity and force us to share the fates of Karen Quinlan and Nancy Cruzan. Although Dowbiggin concludes that acceptance of euthanasia has declined since its peak in the 1990s, he never oversimplifies the issues at stake. The compelling stories in this book anchor euthanasia to the heart of our modern cultural divide, which pits boundless individualism against meaningful community, asserts the need to free sex and death from unhealthy taboos even as the social fabric unravels - and leaves unanswered the great question of what it means to be human apart from religion and the divine. 249 pp.