The recent Supreme Court decision on physician assisted suicide was of particular interest to Calvin College professor of biology Hessel "Bud" Bouma, who has done significant study of the issue. In fact, this past January he delivered a 60-minute lecture on the topic as part of Calvin's The January Series.

Bouma has some strong opinions on the issue -- and on the efforts of Dr. Jack Kevorkian. He says: "Kevorkian plays the media and jurists insisting that he is practicing medicine, seeking to alleviate people's pain and suffering. It is a preposterously illogical but amazingly effective defense. If it's medicine he's practicing, he's doing so without a license. But it isn't medicine -- carbon monoxide is not a medicinal drug."

The emotional debate will impact more and more of us in the new century. Right now, nearly 100,000 Americans are age 100 or older. By the year 2,050 estimates are that 10 times as many of us -- one million Americans! -- will be over the century mark.

"I believe," Bouma says, "that physician-assisted suicide is wrong and that there are good alternatives." Bouma says the debate has several unresolved issues, including:

To what extent is there truly irremediable pain and suffering? Bouma says too many health care practitioners have inadequate knowledge of pain management. We should teach our physicians how to manage pain before we consider training them how to kill.

Is modern medicine able to accept death? For decades we've trained physicians to see death as failure. We need to develop and implement a practice of medicine which enables dying patients to function as well as they can even as they are dying.

Should physicians whose professional calling is to cure and care should now be permitted to assist in killing? If doctors are allowed to kill patients, the doctor-patient relationship will never be the same again.

Will freedom to die lead to a duty to die -- particularly for the elderly, chronically ill and the disabled? Each time Dr. Kevorkian assists someone with ALS, MS or cancer to die, people with similar conditions wonder if death is what society expects of them, or will expect.

Bouma is a strong advocate for hospice care -- with its simple yet elegant philosophy to affirm life and neither hasten nor prolong death. Physician-assisted suicide should not be sought by patients, he says, because we and society are unable to cure and unwilling to care. His work as chair of the Hospice of Greater Grand Rapids board, a subsidiary of Hospice of Michigan (the largest not-for-profit hospice in the United States) has affirmed his faith in hospice care as an alternative to physician assisted suicide.