Bill legalizing assisted suicide gets new life in Lansing
LANSING — Even after the physician assisted suicide ballot proposal got swamped at the ballot box in 1998, many pushing the proposal hoped that it would someday be resurrected.
In the one day the Legislature was scheduled in session during August, a pair of bills legalizing assisted suicide was introduced by a pair of Democrats — state Reps. Sam Singh of East Lansing and Tom Cochran of Mason.
But in the Republican-controlled Legislature, it's unlikely to get much of a hearing, even though Michigan became inextricably linked in the assisted suicide movement because of Dr. Jack Kevorkian, a Royal Oak pathologist who assisted in about 130 cases of euthanasia beginning in 1990. He was convicted of second-degree murder in 1999 and served eight years in prison. He died in 2011 at the age of 83.
The 1998 ballot proposal faced stiff opposition from the Catholic Church and other religious organizations as well as physicians and disability-rights advocates who put up $5 million to defeat the proposal. The supporters of the assisted suicide issue spent most of the money they raised on collecting the signatures they needed to put the issue to a statewide vote.
Read more: http://www.freep.com/story/news/politics/2016/08/13/bill-legalizing-assisted-suicide-gets-new-life-lansing/88537468/