Don't turn doctors into killers

By Denise Noe

Hollywood producer Steve Jones has a biopic of Jack Kevorkian, widely known as “Dr. Death,” in the works.  According to a PR Newswire, Jones says You Don’t Know Jack is not “an endorsement of assisted suicide or a condemnation of it.”   However, he immediately contradicts that pose of objectivity as he continues, “Dr. Kevorkian is a man who walks in the footsteps of Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela.”

Kevorkian’s career ought to serve as a warning of the dangers of accepting euthanasia.  Always fascinated by dying, Kevorkian earned the nickname “Dr. Death” because he photographed the eyes of dying patients and published a journal article on his findings in 1956.

According to the online Answers.com, the doctor started advertising in Detroit papers in 1987 as a “physician consultant” for “death counseling.”  To get around the law that might have had him arrested for murder had he dispensed with a person directly, Kevorkian rigged up a suicide machine in 1988.  The person to be killed had to press a lever him or herself.  54-year-old Janet Adkins, in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, was the first person to use his gizmo, dying in Kevorkian’s van.  He was soon racking up deaths.  Some of the people killed had terminal illnesses; others were disabled and depressed.

Kevorkian appeared on many TV programs.  He presented himself as a humanitarian but his arrogant, amused demeanor was that of a person relishing death.  He was also in and out of courtrooms for many years until finally one sensational case put him behind bars.  Kevorkian killed a suicidal Thomas Youk, who had ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease, with a lethal injection.  Kevorkian also videotaped this event and took the snuff film to Mike Wallace who broadcast it on 60 Minutes. A jury convicted Kevorkian of second-degree murder.  In sentencing him to 10 to 25 years imprisonment, Judge Jessica Cooper said, “When you purposely inject another human being with what you know to be a lethal dose of poison, that, sir, is murder.”  She ended, “You had the audacity to go on national television, show the world what you did and dare the legal system to stop you.  Well, sir, consider yourself stopped.”

When discussing the sensitive and overlapping issues of euthanasia and attempted suicide, it is important to remember what it is not.  Euthanasia is not the practice of simply “letting someone go” by not performing last-ditch and extraordinary medical efforts to prolong every possible last minute of life.  Euthanasia is deliberately putting people to death or, in the case of assisted suicide, facilitating them in doing so.  It is killing.

In an article published in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Jack Reeves argued for voluntary euthanasia.  He noted that his beloved sick cat was given a killing injection by a veterinarian.  He wrote of the relatively painless execution by lethal injection of mass murderer Stanley “Tookie” Williams.  Then he contrasted these deaths with that of his dear wife Nancy who suffered “bodily anguish and horrid consciousness.”  He ended his article by asking why she could not have been treated as the cat or Williams.

There are good reasons.  Human lives must be seen as distinct from that of other animals with a sense of the “sacred” attached even by the most secular and atheistic among us.  Capital punishment punishes by cutting off the condemned’s life rather than gratuitously causing pain during it.

The terminally ill are not a people apart.  The late Ryan White, a hemophiliac who contracted AIDS while a child, was once asked how he coped “knowing you’re going to die.”  The teenager replied, “You’re going to die too” and said he still had much he wanted to do.  All of us are here for a limited period and must do the best we can with the time we have.  In some cases, the time will be shorter than we expect.  In the case of many people with severe illnesses, it will be much longer than is predicted.  Stephen Hawking has lived for decades after coming down with Lou Gehrig’s disease – an illness common among Kevorkian’s “patients” – and they have been brilliantly productive years.

Extreme pain is a real problem and the answer to the anguish of the Nancys is more research into its alleviation.  We should also pull out all the stops even if it means the use of drugs such as marijuana, heroin, and cocaine to reduce agony.  It should not mean turning doctors into killers.

Published in the Bolivar Free-Herald