Sign urges, 'Defend Life: Young/Old/Unborn/and Dying'


The following appeared in the Washington Post, Dec. 12, 1998. Copyright © 1998 by Mary Meehan.

Jack Kevorkian Is No Hero

Mary Meehan

Jack Kevorkian, the retired Michigan pathologist who has switched from assisted suicide to direct killing, is receiving much undeserved support from the media.

William Raspberry gave him a boost in his Nov. 28 op-ed column, "'Dr. Death' Has a Point." Raspberry recalled a friend whose last week of life involved "too much pain and too much machinery and too much loss of dignity." He added that another dying friend said that "medication killed her pain" but "also left her in a zombielike state she detested." Raspberry suggested considering the legalized euthanasia that "Kevorkian has been urging."

The Raspberry column suggests the danger of relying on only one's personal experience--which is always limited, and sometimes severely so--in making ethical judgments. He calls for "safeguards" to prevent coercion and says that "maybe we'd want to exclude from our new law the clinically depressed, the mentally deranged and the merely suicidal." Maybe?

Once the barriers to killing are down, any "safeguards" may prove helpless against pressures to reduce medical costs, the weariness and depression of family caregivers and, in some cases, the desire of family members to preserve an estate.

Jack Kevorkian is no hero. The real heroes are the can-do nurses and therapists who help patients find their deepest strengths. The computer specialists who show people with disabilities how to find new worlds and to enter the job market. The inventors of remarkable gadgets who do the same. And the dying patients' families who live the words of Irish poet Thomas Moore: "the heart that has truly loved never forgets/but as truly loves on to the close."

Also heroic are the people who face their own disability and death with courage. When Ronald Reagan revealed his Alzheimer's disease to the American people in 1994, he did not bemoan his fate or send for Jack Kevorkian. He said that he would "continue to share life's journey with my beloved Nancy and my family. I plan to enjoy the great outdoors and stay in touch with my friends and supporters." While he was sorry that his wife would have to cope with his disease, he said, "I am confident that with your help she will face it with faith and courage."

She has done so. So should we all face the toughest challenges of life and death.


Postscript: In 1999 a Michigan jury convicted Jack Kevorkian of murder in a case of direct euthanasia. Sentencing him to 10-25 years in prison, Judge Jessica Cooper declared: "You had the audacity to go on national TV, show the world what you did and dare the prosecution to stop you. Well, sir, consider yourself stopped." (Washington Post, 14 April 1999, A-2) Kevorkian left prison on parole in June 2007. Former President Reagan had died three years earlier.