Euthanasia

Dr. Jack Kevorkian, better known as “Dr. Death,” died peacefully last week while listening to his favorite composer, Johann Sebastian Bach. Accused by his detractors of being a cruel man — responsible for the killing of more than 130 vulnerable people — and praised by his supporters as a pious man of compassion who helped the terminally ill who requested his services, Kevorkian lived shrouded in controversy.

“I believe,” he said in an interview, “that there are people who are healthy and mentally competent enough to decide on suicide. Everyone has a right for suicide because a person has a right to decide what will or will not be done to his body. There’s no place for people to turn today who really want to commit suicide.”

Kevorkian participated in more than 130 suicides and in four cases he was acquitted of murder. Finally, in 1999, he was convicted in a case in which he was shown injecting lethal drugs into a patient in a recording filmed and sent by him to the program “60 Minutes.” He spent eight years in prison knowing, perhaps, that he had finally completed his purpose of provoking a national debate on euthanasia.

It is a debate that, in general terms, revolves around four issues: Does a person have the right to end his life? Is it true that assisted suicide could cause a deadly trend? Do the doctors who aid in suicide violate the integrity of the medical profession? Is this practice legal?

Regarding the right of individuals to take their own life, a fundamental disagreement exists among the highest religious authorities. According to Pope Benedict XVI, “abortion and euthanasia are sins so serious that the Church does not support the diversity of opinion, even among Catholics who do tolerate it when discussing, for example, it being morally justified to kill in a war or in the case of the death penalty.”* While for the Dalai Lama, “in the event a person is definitely going to die and he is either in great pain or has virtually become a vegetable, and prolonging his existence is only going to cause difficulties and suffering for others, the termination of his life may be permitted according to Mahayana Buddhist ethics.”

Nor is there agreement on the subject of assisted suicides leading to an epidemic of assisted suicides, a hypothesis that has never come true when given cases of assisted suicides.

On the subject of the duty of doctors being obligated to save lives and not to help end them, there is no unified opinion among doctors. And regarding the legality of the act, despite a Supreme Court ruling banning assisted suicide in a specific case, the judges reserved their right to rule on the constitutionality of the cases as they arise.

Meanwhile, in 1997, the state of Oregon passed the Death with Dignity Act, which allows terminally ill people to commit suicide with drugs prescribed by a doctor for that purpose. And everything indicates that the rest of the country is moving in that direction. Almost all U.S. states allow adults to refuse to artificially sustain their lives hooked up to tubes and a machine that feeds them and keeps them in a vegetative state.

Beyond the eccentricities, exhibitionism and arrogance of Dr. Kevorkian, it would be fair to recognize that this new way of approaching the issue of the termination of life in the United States should be, in large part, due to his efforts. Even though I have no plans to commit suicide, I recognize and agree with their central proposition. Nobody has the right to tell me what I should do with myself.

*Editor’s Note: This quote, while accurately translated, could not be verified.