Jack Kovorkian How He Did It

Freethought San Marcos: The Jack Kevorkian most Americans did not know

While Jack Kevorkian created publicity about the right-to-die issue in his own quirky way, he did little to advance serious efforts to make that right available to all Americans. I respected his perseverance, his courage to speak out in the face of unrelenting hostility, and his willingness to risk his own life to advance a cause he strongly believed in, but I thought he was mostly ineffective in helping to achieve the broader goal. Kevorkian helped 130 people who were in misery to die, at their request, but was unwilling to work to help millions of others who want the right to decide for themselves when life is no longer worth living. He did not play well with others, and was, at best, indifferent to the right-to-die movement. Perhaps his greatest contribution is that he spoke out as a medical doctor (he was a pathologist professionally) about the need for physician-assisted death. Kevorkian died on June 3 of a blood clot that lodged in his heart. His end came from natural causes, before his multiple medical problems made him decide it was time to die. Those who have questioned why he didn’t end his own life in one of the ways he had helped 130 others do so don’t understand the right-to-die movement very well. That movement is about personal autonomy, not one person’s decision for another. As author Richard Cote has noted, “Kevorkian’s unaccelerated natural death was a testament to personal autonomy and the fundamental concept that an assisted, hastened death should be a civil right for any rational adult, not an obligation.” Derek Humphry, founder of the Hemlock Society, has written that Hemlock was actively at work for the right to die with physician assistance ten years before Kevorkian began his death assistance work. What Kevorkian helped show us is that there is a need for a reasoned, safeguarded process that allows each individual to decide for himself or herself about ending that individual’s own life with the help of a physician. This process was established in the states of Oregon and Washington by initiatives. And the right to die with assistance is available in Montana as a result of a court decision. I have been involved in the right-to-die movement for close to twenty years for one simple reason: I want to be able to decide for myself when it is time for my life to end if I become physically or mentally impaired to the point that there is little or no meaning to my life.

Why Jack Kevorkian had a profoundly correct message

Issued on his date of reported death, June 3, 2011:

“Dr. Jack Kevorkian, the central figure in a tumultuous national drama surrounding assisted suicide, died Friday in Royal Oak, Mich., his lawyer told the Associated Press. He was 83 and had been hospitalized with pneumonia and a recurring kidney condition. Dr. Kevorkian, a medical pathologist who challenged social taboos about disease and dying, defied prosecutors and the courts to help terminally ill patients end their lives at times of their own choosing. He spent eight years in prison after being convicted of second-degree murder in the death of the last of the more than 100 patients whose suicides he assisted starting in 1990. His stubborn and often intemperate advocacy for the right of the terminally ill to choose how they die is widely credited with sparking a boom in hospice care in the United States, and with making physicians more sympathetic to their pain and more willing to prescribe medication to relieve it.”

Kevorkian’s work in assisted suicide closely followed the uproar that greeted my JAMA publication of the essay “It’s over Debbie” authored by “name withheld by request” on January 8, 1988.

This was a time when the American medical enterprise was very afraid to use opiates to treat pain in cancer and other terminally ill patients, concerned that they would addict, or would be accused of addicting, their desperate patients. And doctors and nurses practiced the notion that human life should be preserved and extended at any cost in suffering or money.

It took the Debbie case, the Kevorkian extreme actions, and yet other trailblazers who saw life and death through a different prism to move our society, ever so slowly, towards realizing that death is not the enemy; the enemies are premature death, disease, disability, pain, human suffering.

Death is normal. Every American deserves to have a death with dignity and as free from pain as possible, as can now happen with much hospice care.

Strange though he was, Jack Kevorkian helped us as a society to move a little closer to that ideal.

Let’s keep that trend line.