Today's impending decision on whether to legalize physician-assisted suicide in Oregon and this past weekend's conference at the Science Center on euthanasia have brought to light the national debate on the right to die.

Guest speakers and students who discussed and debated several views on euthanasia in the conference this weekend--hosted by The Hippocratic Society--were met with protesters chanting "We're Not Dead Yet."

Diane Coleman, spokesperson for the national organization Not Dead Yet--a group dedicated to protecting disabled persons' rights--said the group is against euthanasia because it implies that someone with disability should not live.

"If you're healthy, you get suicide prevention and if you're not, you get suicide assistance," she said.

Thomas Balch, director of the Department of Medical Ethics for the National Right to Life Committee, agreed that euthanasia discriminates against disabled persons.

"We have already seen many instances where people with disabilities are denied suicide counseling that is routinely given to suicidal non-disabled people," he said.

As the largest minority group in America with a one-third unemployment rate, Coleman said that people with disabilities are "oppressed" and "stigmatized."

"Intellectual discussion is going on while members of our minority group are being serial-killed by [Jack] Kevorkian and others and no one is doing anything about it," she said.

But Roy Torcaso, a senior citizen who said he has been active with the group Death with Dignity for many years, said he supports euthanasia because all individuals should have the right to choose how to deal with their suffering.

"It is only the person who is afflicted with some illness or terminal disease who should have the right to make a choice [of life or death] and he should have a choice without any limitation," said Torcaso, who is a former president of The Humanist Association of the Capital Area, Washington D.C.

Supporting his stance for euthanasia, Torcaso said that more than "70 percent of the American people agree with the right of terminally ill people to decide whether they want to live or die."

In addition, he said that he believes "that most objections to physician aid in dying are based upon religious injunctions."

He said that people who disapprove of calling in a doctor to get rid of pain "should not interfere in the affairs of those who hold other religious, or non-religious, views, and whose suffering is so intense that the grave has more appeal than a few more days, weeks or months of continual agony."

But Balch, who said he is agnostic, said that religion has nothing to do with his anti-euthanasia stance.

"It's clear that concerns about euthanasia cover an extreme depth of opinion, predominantly rooted in secular concerns," he said.