A Terrible “Final Exit Network” Assisted Suicide In Phoenix

Once again, the a weekly alternative paper comes in with a big story. This time from Phoenix, where the New Times, byline Paul Rubin, exposes the apparent assisted suicide of a mentally ill woman by members of an assisted suicide outfit called the Final Exit Network. FEN members are zealots who help people kill themselves using helium and drugs. From the story:

Primary sources for this story include extensive police reports about the case, and New Times’ interviews with Jana’s family and with one of the two so-called exit guides from a national assisted-suicide group who were present when Jana died.

That “senior” guide was Wye Hale-Rowe, 79, a retired family therapist and great-grandmother from Aurora, Colorado. The title refers to her experience in the field, not her age. The second guide was Frank Langsner, a retired college professor who lives in Scottsdale. They are volunteers for the nonprofit Final Exit Network, an offshoot of the now-defunct Hemlock Society [actually merged into Compassion and Choices], which was founded in 1980 by author Derek Humphrey…
Humphrey’s bestselling book, Final Exit: The Practicalities of Self-Deliverance and Assisted Suicide for the Dying, was published in 1991 and still sells well. One of its pitches: “Follow my instructions for a perfect death, with no mess, no autopsy, no postmortem.”

It’s an ugly story and Rubin gets to the bottom of it.

I was interviewed extensively by Rubin about the story a few weeks ago. My take and that of pro-assisted suicide advocates Barbara Coombs Lee, head of Compassion and Choices, and Jacob Appel, a pro assisted suicide bioethicist, are presented at some length in a sidebar perspective piece by Rubin. Lee claims to want to limit assisted suicide to the terminally ill, Appel, as I noted here previously at SHS has advocated assisted suicide for the mentally ill, and I oppose all legalization. Our views, and I think the issue itself, are all fairly presented in Rubin’s penetrating journalism.