Death march.

Advocates of euthanasia have a foothold in American culture. Now they're ready to take the next step.

Advocates of legalizing "assisted suicide" have long assured us that euthanasia would be a rare and limited act, reserved exclusively for those who are terminally ill, who are mentally competent to ask for it, and for whom there is no other relief from intolerable pain. It was assurances of this sort that helped induce Oregon voters to pass the world's first law specifically permitting assisted suicide in 1994, and to reaffirm that law last November. But now these assurances are being undermined--by assisted-suicide advocates themselves.

Take the Hemlock Society, probably the best-known organization in this field and an enthusiastic promoter of the Oregon law. Its executive director, Faye Girsh, responded to a recent "mercy" killing of a father by his son in Louisiana by issuing a press release calling for legalization of euthanasia for those unable to decide for themselves. In this document, which went widely unnoticed, she said: "In the case of a minor or an incompetent adult ... some provision should be made" to terminate those lives which, "in the belief of the patient or his agent," are "too burdensome to continue" (emphasis added).

Compassion in Dying, a Hemlock spinoff founded in 1993 to surreptitiously assist in suicides, is also broadening its mandate. Originally a local group in Seattle, it has metastasized into the Compassion in Dying Federation of America, funded in part by billionaire George Soros, who has donated at least $350,000 to various of its constituent groups. From its beginning, Compassion in Dying's PR material has insisted that assisted suicide should be allowed only for the terminally ill.

But, perhaps buoyed by last year's victory in Oregon, the Federation's flagship chapter, Compassion in Dying of Washington, no longer feels bound by such qualifications. A December fundraising letter declared, "We have expanded our mission to include not only terminally ill individuals, but also persons with incurable illnesses which will eventually lead to a terminal diagnosis." That definition covers a lot of conditions. It could include nonsymptomatic HIV infection, kidney disease, early-stage cancer, heart disease, and multiple sclerosis, to name just a few.

That's not all. In a recent talk, Kathryn Tucker, the Federation's legal-affairs director, demonstrated how the Federation actually regards the "protective guidelines" it always claims will shield the vulnerable. One of the most important of these protections is the mandatory waiting period between the request for death and the issuance of the lethal prescription. Oregon's law requires a 15-day wait--not too long, surely, considering the irreversibility of the action. Miss Tucker now says that even this is "overly restrictive." Extrapolating from Planned Parenthood v. Casey and other "reproductive rights" cases, she expects the courts will "immediately" strike down the waiting period as "unduly burdensome."

If so, why did advocates such as Barbara Coombs Lee, the Federation's executive director and co-author of the Oregon law, include the waiting period in the first place? Miss Tucker's candor is breathtaking: "In the legislative forum, to pass [assisted-suicide laws], you need to have measures that convince people that it's suitably protective." She also claims that when the Supreme Court recently declined to create a constitutional right to assisted suicide, it instead created a constitutional right to pain control--so watch for litigation seeking to re-label euthanasia as "pain control."

Thus, it becomes ever more clear that even when activists speak of protections and limitations, terminal illness and suicide, what they are actually working to permit is the intentional killing by doctors of a wide variety of vulnerable human beings.

Jack Kevorkian is busily putting theory into practice. One of his latest victims, Franz-Johann Long, age 53, was mentally ill and under psychiatric treatment from the age of three. Long had been diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic and hospitalized in the 1980s after he had twice attempted suicide. Kevorkian's lawyers maintain that Long was suffering from terminal bladder cancer. But Dr. L. J. Dragovic, the coroner of Oakland County, Michigan, found that while there were signs of cancer in Long's bladder, the disease would have been eminently curable.

But you don't need to have cancer to receive Kevorkian's ministrations. Martha Wichorek, age 82, experienced the usual minor maladies of old age, but the reason she sought out Kevorkian, according to his attorney Geoffrey Feiger, was simply that she "wanted to die." Indeed, her suicide note admitted that she suffered from no serious malady. Thus, her killing was not the shortening of the terminal stage of a painful illness, but simply death-on-demand. Which, it is becoming increasingly clear, is the ultimate destination of the assisted-suicide movement.

Mr. Smith, an attorney for the International Anti-Euthanasia Task Force, is the author of Forced Exit: The Slippery Slope from Assisted Suicide to Legalized Murder, published by Times Books.