Today, Jack Kevorkian, known to some in Michigan as "Dr. Death," received a prison sentence for his role in a death that drew nation-wide publicity when it was broadcast on the TV show "60 Minutes."

That Kevorkian case has been watched with interest by Calvin College professor of Hessel Bouma III, who presented fellow Calvin professors with a one-hour tutorial last fall on physician assisted suicide and Michigan's Proposal B -- which, if had passed in November 1998, would have allowed physician assisted suicide in the state of Michigan.

Bouma has done significant study of the physician assisted suicide debate. In fact, in January 1997 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 (he is against physician assisted suicide) but has given careful study to the rationale of both those for and those against Proposal B. He also has followed physician assisted suicide efforts in other states and has closely tracked the physcian assisted suicide and euthenasia debates in the Netherlands.

And he has met and debated members of Merian's Friends, Inc., the citizens' ballot initiative group that put Physician Aid in Dying, Proposal B, on Michigan's November 3, 1998 ballot.

Bouma notes that the emotional debate over physician assisted suicide 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, 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?

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.