[Right_to_die] What Dr Jack Kevorkian thinks nowadays -- special report

[World right-to-die news list (nonprofit)]

Making a Pennsylvania House Call:

Dr. Jack Kevorkian visits Kutztown University

By Richard N. Côté


Outside Schaeffer Auditorium, small but swelling clusters of students 
from Kutztown University, a small, handsome regional campus of the 
University of Pennsylvania, intently discussed the imminent arrival on 
20 September 2009  of their famous and intensely controversial speaker. 
He was Dr. Jack Kevorkian, soon to turn 81, a retired maverick American 
pathologist who had helped at least 130 people to die between 1989 and 1998.

		INVENTS DEATHING MACHINES

To bring about their voluntary deaths, Kevorkian developed two deathing 
machines in the late 1980s. The first, the Thanatron, was a lethal drug 
injection device that stopped the heart from beating while the patient 
was unconscious from heavy sedation; the second, the Mercitron, brought 
about a peaceful death through inhaling carbon monoxide through a face mask.

Kevorkian, always a freethinker and outspoken loner, became convinced 
that physicians have a moral obligation to help terminally ill patients 
enduring unendurable pain end their lives if they choose to. While in 
medical school, he quickly learned that not only did doctors shun the 
idea of hastening death, but the majority were extremely uncomfortable 
about even discussing death even with their dying patients.

He came to believe strongly that each person has a right to die, with a 
doctor’s assistance, when, where, and how they wanted to. In most 
places, even though suicide itself is not a crime, assisting someone 
else to end their life is illegal. This makes for bizarre laws which 
criminalize helping someone do something that is not a crime. At the 
time he started helping clients die, assisting a suicide was not a crime 
in Michigan.

But because so many lawmakers there found his assisting suicides 
offensive, they quickly enacted a law against it.  It didn’t stop him, 
however. Single-handedly, he tried to force a change in the new law by 
daring prosecutors to arrest and convict him after each new deathing. 
Three arrests led to trials, but each time the charges were thrown out 
or the juries refused to convict him. He began to think of himself as 
invincible.

However, to force the high courts to make a ruling that declared that 
assisting a death was not a criminal act, he made a choice that would 
later come back to haunt him. In 1998, he carried out an act of direct 
euthanasia to end a life. His patient was Thomas Youk, in irreversible, 
terminal decline from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, commonly known as 
“Lou Gehrig’s Disease.”  Youk was incapable of triggering one of 
Kevorkian’s deathing machines by himself, so Kevorkian personally 
injected Youk with the lethal drugs.

		KEVORKIAN CONVICTED AND JAILED.

To ensure that prosecutors did not overlook the case, he videotaped the 
entire deathing, providing the conclusive proof that it was Kevorkian, 
not the patient, who injected the lethal chemicals.  Then he sent the 
tape to CBS News, who aired it on “Sixty Minutes.” Kevorkian was quickly 
arrested and indicted, but in 1999 he was convicted in for murder in the 
second degree.

The judge told him, “consider yourself stopped,” and handed down a 
ten-to-twenty-five year sentence. After serving eight years, he was 
paroled in 2007 for good behavior and because of failing health. A 
condition of his release was that he could not counsel anyone about 
assisted suicide in the future, nor assist anyone in hastening their 
death. His First Amendment right to freedom of speech, however, provide 
him the right to speak publicly about the legalization of assisted 
suicide and euthanasia, and he leaped into that arena with gusto 
immediately after his release

		KEVORKIAN INVITED TO SPEAK
At Kutztown, his presentation was titled, “Civil Rights, Civil 
Disobedience and Criminal Justice.” His speaking fee had been “privately 
negotiated,” said a university official, but the Reading, PA Eagle 
reported it to be $25,000, down from the $50,000 he had received in 
Florida for his first post-prison speaking engagement.

		PRESS CONFERENCE
Now, a decade past his media peak and no longer in the limelight, no 
television satellite trucks surrounded he hall where he held his press 
conference. Only three local newspapers and two local television 
stations covered the event. Kevorkian, looking healthy and 
well-nourished, entered the room wearing a tan suit, sweater vest, coat, 
and tie, looking like a respectable, retired college professor – of the 
1960s.

When I complimented him on his signature “porkpie” hat, he proudly 
endorsed thrift as a virtue, noting that the hat had only cost him five 
dollars at his favorite clothing store: Goodwill. Although healthy in 
appearance, he evidenced a partial hearing loss and sometimes became 
confused about the sources he was quoting.

The right-to-die movement worldwide is far from unanimous in its opinion 
of Kevorkian. Many laud the fact that in the 1990s, he made the right to 
die an issue of enormous interest. Others, noting that he refuses to 
work with any other organized pro-euthanasia organization, or endorse 
any idea or procedure not of his own creation, think of him as an 
egotistical loose cannon rolling on the deck of the euthanasia debate.

Kevorkian is a strong supporter of civil disobedience in the face of 
human rights violations. But he also strongly believes that doctors 
should manage and supervise all cases of voluntary deathing. This runs 
contrary to the beliefs of a large portion of the right-to-die 
community, who believe in personal autonomy, and that only the patient 
and no one else should make all choices about how his or her life should 
end.

In particular, Kevorkian opposes any method of self-deliverance which 
does not require physician involvement at the end. This is also in 
direct opposition to the state-of-the-art methods developed privately by 
a euthanasia think tank known as NuTech for self-deliverance. These 
legal, effective, painless procedures they invented were specifically 
designed to de-medicalize death They have been successfully tested and 
employed many thousands of times, and require no second party—and 
specifically, no doctors—to use.

		FINAL EXIT NETWORK
In a closed-door press conference preceding his talk, Kevorkian lashed 
out at anyone who did not agree with his key concepts. Asked by a 
reporter about the recent arrest of seven members of the Final Exit 
Network, a non-profit, voluntary association which recommends these 
NuTech “physician-less” procedures to its members who want to end their 
lives, Kevorkian responded sharply. “Common sense shows the insanity of 
that statement. What medical service should the patient do on 
themselves? This is a medical service.”

He went on to say that although the decision to elect death is the 
patient’s choice, to carry it out without a doctor’s assistance would be 
absurd. “In ancient Greece and Rome, doctors were always involved,” he 
said, and sees no reason that it should be otherwise now.

Next he was asked about the physician-assisted suicide laws in Oregon 
and Washington, and whether he would support the extension of these laws 
to other states. His response was unequivocal. “That would be like a law 
extending torture. It’s crazy. It has nothing to do with the law.

Those three states—Washington, Oregon, and Montana—are doing it wrong. A 
doctor can’t even participate, and you can’t help the patient if he is 
crippled or paralyzed and can’t put the pill in his mouth…. That’s a 
crazy way. That’s a medical service? Why do we perpetuate suffering like 
that unnecessarily?”

When asked how to improve the Washington and Oregon Death-With-Dignity 
laws, he had a simple answer: abolish them and let the medical 
professionals in each state set the rules for who would be eligible for 
physician-assisted suicide and how euthanasia would be practiced.

		WHY THEY ATTENDED
All the tickets to the talk were distributed to students and faculty 
without cost. Most of the audience were still in elementary school when 
Kevorkian was convicted and jailed. But through their college studies, 
they had learned the basics about him, and that he campaigned for 
legalizing euthanasia. This sparked their interest, and many were 
intensely interested in finding out what he had actually done and why he 
had done it.

Sarah McMillan a senior majoring in molecular biology, was attracted by 
his notoriety. “He’s really famous, and I wanted to learn about 
euthanasia and why he did what he did,” she said.
Lucy Gerhard, a junior studying psychology and criminal justice, came 
because she thinks “he’s just awesome because he’s got guts. I agree 
with what he did, and I’m super-excited to hear what he has to say.”
Morgan Tucker, a recent graduate in political science came out of 
“morbid curiosity,” he said. “Because he’s all about death and dying. 
It’s unusual and interesting to hear people talk about it. I’m up in the 
air about the issue, so I’d like to hear what he has to say.”

All the tickets were all snapped up within three days. Katie Timmerman, 
who lives near Philadelphia, had an intense interest in Kevorkian’s work 
but didn’t qualify as faculty or student. She took the initiative of 
posting her search for two tickets on Craigslist, a buy-or -sell 
Internet website. She was delighted to find two students willing to sell 
their tickets for $10 each. “I as a starving college kid myself twenty 
years ago,” she said. “I know how much ten bucks means to a college kid.”

		PROTESTORS
In the 1990s, Kevorkian was an internationally known lightning rod for a 
polarized debate over the right to die, and often attracted crowds of 
protesters and network television satellite trucks. Some called him a 
serial killer; others an angel of mercy. Two decades later, between 
sixty and seventy-five percent of North American residents believe that 
every person should personally control when, where, and how de dies.
Unlike his volatile public appearances of the past, his presence in 
Kutztown provoked only token protest.

Edward Neely, of Reading, Pennsylvania, said that he opposed everything 
that Kevorkian stood for.  Accompanied by his mother, Jean; two sons; 
two nephews; and a niece, they stood on the sidewalk in front of the 
hall carrying signs that read “Kind Death with God, Cruel Death with 
Man” and “God is the only author of death.” Kevorkian, an atheist, would 
have paid them no mind had he seen their signs. When later asked if he 
had ever sought forgiveness from God for the 130 deathings he has 
admitted to, he replied, “Who’s God?”

		THE LECTURE
Kevorkian’s eight-year prison experience had not dulled his colorful, 
intense, and often disarmingly humorous speaking style. When he rose to 
start his speech, he smiled, surveyed the serious, attentive audience, 
and broke the ice by saying, “Why would you waste a Sunday evening 
coming to listen to an ex-convict?” It did the trick. In one sentence, 
he dispelled the image that he was nothing more than a heartless 
messenger of death.

The entire lecture, which lasted over an hour and a half, was a typical 
Kevorkian “stump speech,” pointing out the same six or seven themes he 
has been preaching for thirty years. Nothing was revealed that was not 
already on the public record. But the audience of over 700 people, 98 
per cent of which had never read a book or article about him, paid 
unflagging attention to what he had to say.

He first focused his attention on the alleged “hiding” the importance 
and power of the Ninth Amendment. Then he exhorted the students to take 
up the cause of civil disobedience to make the world a better place.
Next he vilified the Supreme Court, which he would abolish, noting that 
it had, in the past, validated slaveowning, “separate-but-equal” 
facilities for Blacks prior to the Civil Rights Movement, and the 
incarceration in resettlement camps of thousands of Japanese-Americans 
during World War II.

He blamed the willing acceptance of these un-democratic actions on 
public apathy, coining the phrase, “we, the American sheeple” to 
describe those who let their rights be trampled or revoked through 
indifference.

Moving on to euthanasia, he declared ridiculous all systems of 
regulating physician-assisted suicide, save for his own model, published 
in a 1988 medical journal article. In it, he described a new branch of 
medicine that he called “obitiatry.”  It would provide planned deaths 
through a network of suicide clinics (“obitoria”) in each state.

Patients who had chosen to die would have the option of permitting 
medical experimentation and organ donation while under deep anesthesia 
prior to their deaths.

When asked by a student, “Have you sought public forgiveness or the 
forgiveness of God for what you have done?” Kevorkian, an atheist, 
answered, “Who is God?” The audience applauded.

When the moderator finally called an end to the program, then into its 
second hour of overtime, he permitted one final question.  “What happens 
to you after you die?” a young man asked.
Kevorkian smiled mildly and said, “You stink.”

But Kevorkian always has the last word. After the applause, he made his 
final point—the only one he hadn’t made dozens of times in the past. He 
announced that he had coined a new medical term to define the elective 
ending of the life of a consenting adult by a doctor.

Euthanasia or assisted suicide can be done by anyone, he said. His new 
term for doctor-assisted deathing was “patholysis,” from the Greek. “The 
A.M.A. must recognize it,” he said with certainty. “They’ll have no 
choice…. What counts is what the patient desires, what the patient 
needs—that calls for a doctor—and that’s all it takes. It’s up to the 
doctor to do the thing that will solve his problem…. It’s the same with 
euthanasia. I don’t do it because I like to see people die. I do it 
because it’s the only way to end their agony.”

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