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LCMS 2026 Convention Workbook: Reports and Overtures, PDF page 241

2026 Convention Workbook
206 
THEOLOGICAL DOCUMENTS  —COMMISSION ON THEOLOGY AND CHURCH RELATIONS
APPENDIX
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CHRONOLOGY OF ASSISTED DYING EFFORTS IN THE U.S.
194
Ian Dowbiggin offers two of the most useful histories of the euthanasia movement in America.195 Readers wishing to deal with the philo-
sophical and historical factors leading to success and failure of the efforts to push for physician-assisted suicide/dying would be rewarded 
by reading his volumes. Dowbiggin roots the emergence of right-to-die agitation in a “combination of a fervent quest to maximize human 
freedom and the reformist urge to socialize individual identities in the service of utilitarian goals” within a larger mindset of progressivism 
in the early twentieth century.
196 /T_he following chronology was compiled by noted physician-assisted dying advocate, Derek Humphry. 
Usage of this chronology for informational purposes does not, obviously, imply support for or agreement with Humphry’s views or inter-
pretations of these events.
Pre-1950s
1906 First euthanasia bill drafted in Ohio. It does not succeed.
1935 World’s first euthanasia society is founded in London, England.
1938 The Euthanasia Society of America is founded in New York by Unitarian minister Rev. Charles Potter. 
1950s
1954 American professor Joseph Fletcher publishes Morals and Medicine, predicting the coming controversy over the right to die.
1957 Pope Pius XII issues Catholic doctrine distinguishing ordinary from extraordinary means for sustaining life.
1958 Oxford law professor Glanville Williams publishes The Sanctity of Life and the Criminal Law, proposing that voluntary euthanasia be allowed for 
competent, terminally ill patients.
1960s
1967 The first living will is written by attorney Louis Kutner, and his arguments for it appear in the Indiana Law Journal.
1967 A right-to-die bill is introduced by Dr. Walter W. Sackett in Florida’s legislature. It arouses extensive debate but is unsuccessful.
1968 Doctors at Harvard Medical School propose redefining death to include brain death as well as heart-lung death. Gradually this definition is 
accepted.
1969 A voluntary euthanasia bill is introduced in the Idaho legislature. It fails.
1969 Psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross publishes On Death and Dying, in which she proposes the five-stages model for those facing death.
1970s
1970 The Euthanasia Society (U.S.) finishes distributing 60,000 living wills.
1973 The American Hospital Association creates the Patient Bill of Rights, which includes informed consent and the right to refuse treatment.
1973 Dr. Gertruida Postma, who gave her dying mother a lethal injection, receives a light sentence in the Netherlands. The furor launches the eutha-
nasia movement in that country: The Dutch Association for a Voluntary End of Life (NVVE).
1974 The Euthanasia Society in New York is renamed the Society for the Right to Die. The first American hospice opens in New Haven, Conn.
1975 Henry P. Van Dusen, 77, and his wife, Elizabeth, 80, leaders of the Christian ecumenical movement, commit suicide rather than suffer from 
disabling conditions. Their note reads, “We still feel this is the best way and the right way to go.”
1976 The New Jersey Supreme Court allows Karen Ann Quinlan’s parents to disconnect her respirator, saying it is affirming the choice Karen herself 
would have made. The Quinlan case becomes a legal landmark. Quinlan lives another eight years.
1976 The California Natural Death Act is passed. The nation’s first aid-in-dying statute gives legal standing to living wills and protects physicians from 
being sued for failing to treat incurable illnesses.
194 The following chronology is taken from Derek Humphry’s book Final Exit: /T_he Practicalities of Self-Deliverance and Assisted Suicide for the Dying, Delta, 2002. It is also available at /f_inalexit.
org/chronology_right-to-die_events.html.
195 Ian Dowbiggin, A Merciful End: /T_he Euthanasia Movement in Modern America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. From A Concise History of Euthanasia: Life, Death, God, and Medicine
(Lanham, Md.: The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, 2005).
196 Dowbiggin, A Merciful End, xiii.
APPENDIX
46
1976 Ten more U.S. states pass natural death laws.
1976 The first international meeting of right-to-die groups is held in Tokyo.
1977 A people’s initiative asking the Swiss Federal Parliament to allow euthanasia for incurably ill people in the Swiss canton of Zurich is passed by a 
vote of 203,148 to 144,822, but the Federal Parliament does not follow the initiative.
1978 Doris Portwood publishes Common Sense Suicide: The Final Right. It argues that old people in poor health might justifiably kill themselves.
1978 Whose Life Is It Anyway?, a play about a young artist who becomes quadriplegic, is staged in London and on Broadway, raising questions about 
the right to die. A film version appears in 1982. Simultaneously, Jean’s Way is published in England by Derek Humphry, describing how he helped his 
terminally ill wife to die.
1979 Two right-to-die organizations split. The Society for the Right to Die separates from Concern for Dying, a companion group that grew out of the 
Society’s Euthanasia Education Council.
1980s
1980 The advice column “Dear Abby” publishes a letter from a reader agonizing over a dying loved one, after which the Society for the Right to Die 
receives 30,000 advance care directive requests.
1980 Pope John Paul II issues the “Declaration on Euthanasia,” which opposes mercy killing but permits the greater use of painkillers to ease pain 
and the right to refuse extraordinary means for sustaining life.
1980 The Hemlock Society is founded in Santa Monica, Calif., by Derek Humphry. It advocates legal change and distributes how-to-die information. 
This launches the campaign for assisted dying in America. Hemlock’s national membership grows to 50,000 within a decade. Right-to-die societies 
are formed in France, Germany and Canada.
1980 The World Federation of Right to Die Societies is formed in Oxford, England. It comprises 27 groups from 18 nations.
1981 Hemlock publishes a how-to suicide guide, Let Me Die Before I Wake.
1984 Advance care directives become recognized in 22 states and the District of Columbia.
1984 The Netherlands Supreme Court approves voluntary euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide under strict conditions.
1985 Karen Ann Quinlan dies.
1985 Betty Rollin publishes Last Wish, her account of helping her mother die after a long battle with breast cancer. The book becomes a bestseller.
1986 Roswell Gilbert, 76, is sentenced in Florida to 25 years without parole for shooting his terminally ill wife. He is granted clemency five years later.
1986 
Elizabeth Bouvia is granted the right to refuse food by an appeals court but ultimately declines to take advantage of the permission. She was still 
alive in 2008.
1987 The California State Bar Conference passes Resolution #3-4-87 to become the first public body to approve of physician aid in dying.
1988 The Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations passes a national resolution favoring aid in dying for the terminally 
ill, becoming the first 
religious body to affirm a right to die.
1990s
1990 The American Medical Association adopts the formal position that, with informed consent, a physician can withhold or withdraw treatment from 
a patient who is close to death and may also discontinue life support of a patient in a permanent coma.
1990 Dr. Jack Kevorkian assists in the death of Janet Adkins, a middle-aged woman with Alzheimer’s disease. Kevorkian subsequently flaunts the 
Michigan legislature’s attempts to stop him from assisting in additional suicides.
1990 The U.S. Supreme Court decides the Cruzan case, its first aid-in-dying ruling. The decision recognizes that competent adults have a constitu-
tionally protected liberty interest that includes a right to refuse medical treatment; the court also allows a state to impose procedural safeguards to 
protect its interests.
1990 Congress passes the Patient Self-Determination Act, requiring hospitals that receive federal funds to tell patients that they have a right to 
demand or refuse treatment. It takes effect the next year.
1991
 Dr. Timothy Quill writes about “Diane” in the New England Journal of Medicine, describing his provision of lethal drugs to a leukemia patient who 
chose to die at home by her own hand rather than undergo therapy that offered a 25% chance of survival.
1991 A nationwide Gallup poll finds that 75% of Americans approve of living wills.
1991 Derek Humphry publishes Final Exit, a how-to book on “self-deliverance.” The book becomes a U.S. bestseller, with subsequent editions 
published in 1996 and 2002.
APPENDIX
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1991 Choice in Dying is formed by the merger of two aid-in-dying organizations, Concern for Dying and Society for the Right to Die. The new organiza-
tion becomes known for defending patients’ rights and promoting living wills, and grows in five years to 150,000 members.
1992 California voters defeat Proposition 161, which would have allowed physicians to hasten death by actively administering or prescribing medica-
tions for self-administration by suffering, terminally ill patients. The percentage vote is 54–46.
1993 Derek Humphry starts ERGO (Euthanasia Research and Guidance Organization), a nonprofit group to research and publish literature on the right 
to die.
1993 Compassion in Dying is founded in the state of Washington to counsel the terminally ill and provide information about how to die without 
suffering and “with personal assistance, if necessary, to intentionally hasten death.” The group sponsors suits challenging state laws against assisted 
suicide.
1993 Oregon Right to Die, a political action committee, is founded. It writes and subsequently passes the Oregon Death with Dignity Act by way of a 
citizens ballot initiative.
1994 All 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia now recognize some type of advance directive procedure.
1994 Washington’s anti-suicide law is overturned. In Compassion v. Washington, a district court finds that a law outlawing assisted suicide violates the 
Fourteenth Amendment. Chief District Judge Barbara Rothstein writes, “The court does not believe that a distinction can be drawn between refusing 
life-sustaining medical treatment and physician-assisted suicide by an uncoerced, mentally competent, terminally ill adult.”
1994 In New York State, the lawsuit Quill et. al. v. Koppell is filed to challenge the New York law prohibiting assisted suicide. Quill loses and files an 
appeal.
1994 Oregon voters approve Measure 16, a Death with Dignity Act ballot initiative that would permit terminally ill patients, under certain guidelines, to 
obtain a physician’s prescription to end life. The vote percentage is 51–49. But U.S. District Court Judge Michael Hogan issues a temporary restraining 
order against the measure, followed by an injunction barring the state from putting the law into effect.
1995 Washington’s Compassion ruling is overturned by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, reinstating the anti-suicide law.
1995 U.S. District Judge Michael Hogan rules that Oregon Measure 16, the Death with Dignity Act, is unconstitutional on the grounds that it violates 
the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution. His ruling is immediately appealed.
1995 Surveys find that doctors disregard most advance directives. The Journal of the American Medical Association reports that physicians were 
unaware of the directives of three-fourths of all elderly patients admitted to a New York hospital; the California Medical Review reports that three-
fourths of all advance directives are missing from Medicare records in that state.
1995 Oral arguments in the appeal of Quill v. Vacco contest the legality of New York’s anti-suicide law before the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.
1995 The Compassion case is reconsidered in Washington by a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals panel of 11 judges, the largest panel ever to hear a 
physician-assisted suicide case.
1996 The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reverses the Compassion finding in Washington, holding that “a liberty interest exists in the choice of how 
and when one dies, and that the provision of the Washington statute banning assisted suicide, as applied to competent, terminally ill adults who wish 
to hasten their deaths by obtaining medication prescribed by their doctors, violates the Due Process Clause.” The ruling affects laws of nine states. It 
is stayed, pending appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
1996 A Michigan jury acquits Kevorkian of violating a state law banning assisted suicide.
1996 The Second Circuit Court of Appeals reverses the Quill finding, ruling that “The New York statutes criminalizing assisted suicide violate the Equal 
Protection Clause because, to the extent that they prohibit a physician from prescribing medications to be self-administered by a mentally competent, 
terminally ill person in the final stages of his terminal illness, they are not rationally related to any legitimate state interest.” The ruling affects laws in 
New York, Vermont and Connecticut. On April 17, the court stays enforcement of its ruling for 30 days pending an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
1996 The U.S. Supreme Court announces that it will review both cases sponsored by Compassion in Dying, known now as Washington v. Glucksberg
and Quill v. Vacco.
1997 On May 13, the Oregon House of Representatives votes 32–26 to return Measure 16 to the voters in November for repeal (H.B. 2954). On June 
10, the Senate votes 20–10 to pass H.B. 2954 and return Measure 16 to the voters for repeal. No similar attempt to overturn the will of the voters has 
been tried in Oregon since 1908.
1997 On June 26, the U.S. Supreme Court reverses the decisions of the Ninth and Second Circuit Courts of Appeals in Washington v. Glucksberg and 
Quill v. Vacco, upholding as constitutional state statutes that bar assisted suicide. However, the court also validates the concept of “double effect,” 
openly acknowledging that death hastened by increased palliative measures does not constitute prohibited conduct so long as the intent is the 
relief of pain and suffering. The majority opinion ends with the pronouncement: “Throughout the nation, Americans are engaged in an earnest and 
profound debate about the morality, legality and practicality of physician-assisted suicide. Our holding permits this debate to continue, as it should in 
a democratic society.”
APPENDIX
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1997 Britain’s Parliament rejects, by 234 votes to 89, the seventh attempt in 60 years to change the law on assisted suicide, despite polls showing 
82% of British people want change.
1997 On Nov. 4, the people of Oregon vote by a margin of 60–40% against Measure 51, which would have repealed the 1994 Oregon Death with 
Dignity Act. The law officially takes effect (ORS 127.800-897) on Oct. 27, when court challenges are disposed of. Actual implementation of the law 
starts on the first day of 1998.
1998 The Oregon Health Services Commission decides that payment for physician-assisted suicide can come from state funds under the Oregon 
Health Plan. 
1998 Sixteen people die by making use of the Oregon Death with Dignity Act, receiving physician-assisted suicide in its first full year of 
implementation.
1998 Measure B on the Michigan ballot to legalize physician-assisted suicide is defeated by a margin of 70–30%.
1998 The Swiss association DIGNITAS is founded. It offers assisted suicide and accepts members from abroad.
1999 Kevorkian is sentenced to 10 to 25 years in prison for the second-degree murder of Thomas Youk after showing a video of Youk’s death by 
injection on national television. His appeals are dismissed.
2000s
2002 A Dutch law allowing voluntary euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide — which had been permitted under certain guidelines for 20 years — 
takes effect on Feb. 1. 
2002 Belgium passes a law similar to the Dutch law, allowing both voluntary euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide.
2003 U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft asks the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to reverse the finding of a lower court judge that the Oregon Death 
with Dignity Act of 1994 does not contravene federal powers. Up to this point, 129 dying people have used the law to obtain physician-assisted 
suicide. The losers of this appeal ask the U.S. Supreme Court to rule, which it agrees to do.
2003 The British Parliament rejects the Patient (Assisted Dying) Bill introduced by Lord Joffe. Identical to the Oregon law, it was fiercely opposed by 
the churches. This was the eighth time in 60 years that a right to die bill was refused by Parliament.
2004 Hemlock Society USA is renamed End-of-Life Choices and within months is merged with Compassion in Dying to become Compassion & 
Choices (C&C). The Final Exit Network is formed to provide volunteers across America to help dying people who request assistance.
2004 Lesley Martin of New Zealand completes a seven-month prison sentence for the attempted murder by morphine overdose of her terminally ill 
mother. She vows to continue to work for lawful voluntary euthanasia.
2005 Terri Schiavo of Florida dies when her feeding tube is removed after she lived for 14 years in a persistent vegetative state. President George 
W. Bush, Florida Governor Jeb Bush, Schiavo’s parents and right-to-life advocates had fought to keep her on life support, but her husband, Michael 
Schiavo, successfully used the legal system to have her feeding tube removed. 
2006 The U.S. Supreme Court refuses the U.S. Attorney General’s application to repeal the Oregon Death with Dignity Act. The George W. Bush 
administration wanted the law struck down on the grounds that states do not control lethal drugs, but Oregon successfully argued that states control 
medical practice and that the drugs required for this form of death were never meant to be banned.
2006 Dr. Philip Nitschke publishes The Peaceful Pill Handbook, outlining ways to bring one’s own life to an end. It is immediately banned in his own 
country, Australia, as well as in New Zealand.
2007 Jack Kevorkian is released from prison on parole after serving nine years. He helped some 130 people to die, all within his home area.
2008 Voters in Washington approve, by 59-41%, a physician-assisted suicide law similar to that in Oregon. In the first year, 63 people are recorded as 
having used it.
2009 The Montana Supreme Court rules that physician-assisted suicide is not against the law in that state.
2010s
2011 After a two-week trial, an Arizona jury acquits Dr. Lawrence Egbert in the suicide of Jana Van Voorhis, whom prosecutors said he had assisted 
in killing herself. Egbert, who also is indicted in Georgia on charges that he helped a man with cancer kill himself, is one of four people charged by 
Arizona authorities in Van Voorhis’ death. Jurors are unable to reach a verdict for a co-defendant, Frank Langsner. According to Maricopa County 
prosecutors, the other two defendants in the case, Wye Hale-Rowe and Roberta Massey, had pled guilty to one count of facilitation to commit man-
slaughter and had agreed to testify in the case.
2011 Sharlotte Hydorn, 92, a retired school teacher who was selling helium hood kits designed to help people commit suicide, pleads guilty in a San 
Diego federal court to a misdemeanor charge of failing to file a tax return. According to court records, Hydorn sold approximately 1,300 suicide kits 
since 2007.