Potter & Euthanasia

A good-looking woman osteopath of Miami tossed the subject of "mercy deaths" into the news again last week by poisoning her incurably sick daughter Barbara and then trying to kill herself. In a typical note Dr. Frances A. Tuttle tried to explain: "Barbara is sick. . . . I don't want her to stay behind and suffer. . . . I am too tired and sick to hold on."

To an emotional Manhattan theorizer who has successively been a Baptist, Unitarian and Universalist preacher, and now is a New Humanist, an Extra-Sensory Perceptionist* and Euthanatist Charles Francis Potter, Dr. Tuttle's murder and attempted suicide were reasonable. He and a sizable group of other notable men believe so strongly in the right of an incurably diseased individual to have his life terminated gently that they have organized a National Society for the Legalization of Euthanasia. For purposes of their propaganda the Miami incident came in handy, occurring as it did the very day after Dr. Potter first publicly announced his organization and revealed that its trustees included Dr. Clarence Cook Little of the American Society for the Control of Cancer and of the American Birth Control League, and Secretary Leon Fradley Whitney of the American Eugenics Society.

In England there exists a Voluntary Euthanasia Legalization Society, which a year ago failed to get the House of Lords to pass a bill making mercy killing legal. Last February one of Dr. Potter's high-placed disciples, John H. Comstock of the Nebraska Legislature, failed to persuade that body to legalize the unorthodox procedure. Last week Dr. Potter promised that Mr. Comstock will try again this term. Other disciples promised to introduce similar bills in the Ohio and New York Legislatures and in Congress. If these bills become law, anyone who can get two disinterested doctors to convince a judge that he is incurably diseased can get himself mercifully put to death. By the same legal procedure custodians of imbeciles may have their wards done away with.

Arguing that his newest enthusiasm has good chance for success in the U. S., Dr. Potter cited Czechoslovakia's new penal code which provides that a person who "kills on request" receives a five-to-ten-year prison sentence, and he who "kills in sympathy" is liable to three months to five years.

*Believer in telepathy and clairvoyance.

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