Euthanasia activist Jack Kevorkian and his fight for the right to die
By Alex Stanton, Staff Writer
“Life is sacred.”
For the most part, this is a universally accepted norm in our modern society that we must do absolutely everything in our power to save the lives of those in need. Unless you’ve written a DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) order, no matter how grievous your injuries are, doctors will do everything possible to save you. Many organized religions have rules specifically forbidding cold-blooded murder, and Catholicism views suicide as a major sin. As for the death penalty, most of the world has completely abolished it
Any way you look at it, death is a pretty frightening concept. Very few physically and mentally healthy people wish to see their lives end. Your mortality is always in the back of your mind, but it’s an impossible concept to fathom. To put it simply, death is the end of a hopefully long and fruitful journey we call life—a journey which most are by no means looking forward to ending.
But what about those who are experiencing symptoms of the late stages of a terminal illness? The ones who spend every waking hour in pain, so agonizing that no amount of painkillers in the world could relieve their suffering? There are many serious afflictions and illnesses that take such a toll on whoever is suffering from them, that many—if not most—would consider a fate worse than death. There are people out there of sound mind who have decided that they want to end their immense suffering peacefully. Don’t they deserve the option to seek out a way to die with dignity that falls within the confines of the law?
Jack Kevorkian, a pathologist who graduated from University of Michigan Medical School in 1952, began writing about this very subject in 1980 for the German journal, Medicine and Law; the culmination of his work at the publication was, arguably, his article The Last Fearsome Taboo: Medical Aspects of Planned Death, published in 1988. In it, he expressed his desire for the establishment and legalization of what he called “death clinics,” where those who’ve consented to assisted suicide could die with dignity on their own terms. They’d also be given the option to contribute their bodies and organs to science—neither of these were common topics of discussion in the twilight years of the 20th century. He discusses a handful of hypothetical patients, including a man in his 30s with cerebral palsy, and a terminally-ill, severely handicapped newborn, and described situations in which they would achieve consent and carry out any procedure or organ removal as efficiently as possible. The paper was famous enough for Kevorkian to be dubbed by the media as “Dr. Death,” a nickname he apparently earned among his inner circle decades before.
One year after this ground-breaking and controversial paper was published, Kevorkian—using electrical switches, magnets, and household tools purchased at a garage sale—created the “Thanatron” (translated to Greek as death machine), a machine which triggered an intravenous dose of drugs to the patients, which would first put them in a comatose state, and then cause a heart attack after consciousness was lost.
In 1990, the hypothetical became real when Kevorkian met 54-year-old Alzheimer’s patient Janet Adkins of Portland, Oregon. Adkins played a small but significant role in Kevorkian’s life as the patient on whom he—using the Thanatron—assisted his first suicide. As there were no laws against assisted suicide in Michigan at the time, the charges of murder against him were dropped. In 1991, after assisting in two more suicides, the State of Michigan revoked his medical licence. Although Michigan had outlawed assisted suicide in 1994, Oregon voted to pass the Death with Dignity Act in the same year, making it the first state to legalize euthanasia. Kevorkian’s activism for suffering patients was applauded and supported by a large majority of doctors country-wide, including those in his home state of Michigan. By 1998—after spending most of the ‘90s in and out of court due to the questionable legality of his practice—Kevorkian had performed about 100 assisted suicides using the Thanatron.
Thomas Youk, a 52-year-old sufferer of Lou Gehrig’s Disease (commonly known as ALS) for two years, sought out the services of Kevorkian due to progressing to the point of full-blown quadriplegia. Youk gave Kevorkian his informed consent, in writing, to the procedure; on September 17, 1998, Kevorkian personally administered the fatal cocktail intravenously, ending Youk’s life—events which the doctor videotaped.
Kevorkian allowed 60 minutes to air his recording of the assisted suicide of Youk—an utterly shocking move done to bring awareness to his cause and to challenge the authorities to arrest him.
He succeeded with flying colours on both counts. The death of Youk became one of the most influential talking points among medical practitioners and ethics experts. More significantly for Kevorkian himself, the state had accepted his challenge; he was charged and arrested for second degree murder and delivery of a controlled substance. The jury dropped the latter charges, but found Kevorkian guilty of murder, and handed down a sentence of 10–25 years in prison.
Kevorkian, at 80, was paroled in the summer of 2007 for good behaviour. He spent just over eight years in prison. Although he was, under no uncertain terms, banned from ever practicing medicine again, he spent the remaining three years of his life advocating for the cause he had fought for his entire career as a medical professional. His life was claimed by Thrombosis on June 3, 2011.
There are very few topics in society more dividing than that of whether anyone has the right to end their life on their own terms and, if so, who we allow to take this drastic measure. Kevorkian, whether you saw him as a hero or a murderer, was a pioneer for education on the subject; however, even advocates for assisted suicide rights are divided on Kevorkian’s methods. The author of a suicide handbook called Final Exit, Derek Humphry, wrote off Kevorkian as “too fanatical, too obsessed” about his suicide-related work to be of any use to the movement. On the other side of the spectrum, Philip Nitschke, founder of euthanasia advocate company Exit International, acknowledged Kevorkian’s role in bringing this topic to the forefront of medical discourse by calling his willingness to accept imprisonment for his beliefs as “the hallmark of a true hero”.
The epitaph on Kevorkian’s tombstone reads, “He sacrificed himself for everyone’s rights.” On February 6 of this year, denying someone the right to die with dignity was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of Canada. Physician-assisted euthanasia is legal by state law in four US territories.
It may take a while to get the ball rolling in terms of putting all the legal aspects to paper but if there’s ever a world where voluntary euthanasia is fully legalized, there need to be very strict regulations so that the right people make the right decisions for themselves. After all, who are we to decide who’s suffering and to what degree?
