Right-to-Die Responses from a Random Sample of 200

Seeking public attitudes toward the right-to-die, 200 telephone interviews were conducted with a random sample of residents in a midwestern city in the summer of 1990. Overall, 90% favored some kind of personal control over death circumstances. With semantics as an independent variable (euthanasia, mercy killing, physician-assisted suicide, or some form of personal control over death) only the group to whom "physician-assisted suicide" had been presented as a choice said "no" or "probably not" to a legalization question (p = < .0001).