The media love social outlaws, particularly those involved with assisted suicide, and rarely challenge them in interviews or journalistic profiles—a phenomenon I have discussed here at SHS before. That could explain why Ted Goodwin, the former head of Final Exit Network and vice president of the World Federation of Right to Die Societies, sat down with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution for a chat, despite being under indictment: He knew he had nothing to fear.
True to form, Goodwin is not challenged or pressed. I mean catch the first question! From the interview:
Q: Tell me about the first “exit” you participated in. Were you scared?
Compassionate Ted was apprehensive, we learn, but his first suicide thought he was an “angel,” and so a life’s purpose was found.
Asked if he is religious, Goodwin soothes:
Every day of my upbringing my parents taught me decency and generosity and compassion for others. And so that’s my spirituality. I look upon what we do as a ministry.
The tough interlocutor then asks how Goodwin “feels” when someone he has just been talking to expires:
This is a very difficult job to be able to befriend someone, to visit them sometimes four, five and six times—talk with them over the phone—and then to know that someday you’re going to be in attendance when they end their own lives. It takes a real mental strength to be able to deal with that and not emotionally dissolve…
But he has what it takes and selflessly carries on. And here’s a question that begged a follow up, which unsurprisingly, was never asked:
Q: Why do you accept people who are not terminal?
A: Why should we make that decision for someone, that their suffering is any less than those that have, by the grace of God, a time limit on their suffering?
I wonder why the interviewer didn’t ask Goodwin why FEN cleans up after the suicide, removing the helium canister and the bag used to cause death. I wonder why he didn’t bring up the Phoenix case in which a mentally ill woman was, it is suspected, “counseled” by FEN representatives. I wonder why he didn’t mention that the man he is accused of assisting in suicide had been successfully treated for cancer.
Oh never mind: I am spitting into the wind.
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