‘I’m the Doctor Who Is Here to Help You Die’

March 4, 2021

(The Atlantic) – This would be Shavelson’s 90th assisted death. Everyone said that no doctor in California did more deaths than Shavelson. He would say that this had little to do with him and more to do with the fact that other doctors refused to perform assisted deaths, or were forbidden to do them by the hospitals and hospices where they worked. Sometimes, Shavelson told me, he got quiet phone calls from doctors at Catholic health systems. “I have a patient,” the doctors would say. “Can you help?”