He’s back. Jack Kevorkian is again on the front pages above the fold. And he’s making the rounds of interviews. He might think he has died and gone to heaven—except he doesn’t believe in heaven. After death, he has said, “you stink and rot.”
With the release of the HBO movie, “You Don’t Know Jack,” millions of people will get a glimpse of Jack Kevorkian as a physician who helped desperately ill people die using his “Mercy Machine.” Yet, the Jack that most people haven’t heard of is far from a benevolent character.
I first met Jack via telephone in 1989 when we debated on a Cincinnati radio program. At that time he was searching for someone on whom he could test what he then called his “self-execution machine.” The ideal candidate, he explained, could be someone with multiple sclerosis, severe arthritis, or a terminal illness. It wasn’t until after his first victim died that he began to use more media-friendly labels for his gadget, like “mercitron” or “mercy machine.”
The media portrayed him as a retired pathologist. But Jack wasn’t retired, he was unemployed. With the exception of his residency and his military service in the 1950s, he had no clinical experience with live patients. He was even turned down for a job as a paramedic in 1989.
He did write many papers, though, trying to establish a new specialty called “obitiatry,” with his ultimate aim being an “auction market” using organs taken from “subjects” who were “hopelessly crippled by arthritis or malformations.” What a guy.
As for compassion, decide for yourself. In 1986, he described experimentation in which “subjects,” including infants, children and the mentally incompetent, would be used for experiments “of any kind or complexity.” Then, if the subject’s body was still alive after experimentation, “death may be induced” by such means as “removal of organs for transplantation” or “a lethal dose of a new or untested drug to be administered by an official executioner.” Four years later, he penned a statement explaining that the “voluntary self-elimination of individual and mortally diseased or crippled lives taken collectively can only enhance the preservation of public health and welfare.”
Yet, public perception of Kevorkian as a kindly doctor who eased the suffering of terminally ill patients remains. This, despite the fact that many among his 130 known victims were not “terminally ill.” In fact, autopsies found that some had no serious physical maladies at all.
Jack’s gruesome ideas and bizarre actions didn’t dampen the praise from the so-called right-to-die movement. In 1999, the head of the Hemlock Society (now known as Compassion & Choices) explained that Kevorkian had been “practicing what we preached.” Even today, another Hemlock spin-off called the Final Exit Network is urging its members to watch “You Don’t Know Jack” which, it says, has put the right to die in the forefront again.
It remains highly doubtful, however, that those who do watch the HBO flick will know the Real Jack Kevorkian.
Rita L. Marker is an attorney and executive director of the International Task Force on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide.
April 23rd, 2010 | 1:30 pm
He sounds like a wannabe josef mengele.
April 23rd, 2010 | 3:30 pm
Al Pacino played Michael Corleone and became famous. I guess it’s natural for him to play another killer known in real life as Jack Kevorkian.
April 23rd, 2010 | 3:50 pm
[...] You Don’t Know Jack: At least not as the media portrays him [...]
April 23rd, 2010 | 6:05 pm
Jack Kevorkian, if I can play armchair psychiatrist, is a necrophile. I don’t mean anything sexual, but rather that he is drawn to death and the dead.
To satisfy his desire, he became perhaps the most successful serial killer in world history. Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy did not get Oscar-winners to play them, nor were they likely to be pleased with how they were portrayed.
Kevorkian’s paintings are the dead (pardon the expression) giveaway. Google them if you have a strong stomach and a morbid curiousity.
April 23rd, 2010 | 10:00 pm
Dr. Kevorkian believed that mentally competent adults have a basic human right to end their lives when they suffer from a fatal or irreversible illiness or intractable pain, when their quality of life is personally unacceptable, and the future holds only hopelessness and misery. Final Exit Network also believes this.
April 24th, 2010 | 4:04 am
Wesley Smith has aptly discribed Kevorkian as a dangerous nut. The fact that he’s out there, propagating his views, means we should worry about the safety of vulnerable people. He does not desrerve to be called a doctor. He does precisely the opposite of what a real physician should do. Real physicians care for the ill and vulnerable, they TREAT them, they don’t KILL them. We need to simply refer to him as the killer, Jack Kevorkian.
April 26th, 2010 | 3:42 am
Jim Chastain — actually, Kevorkian only began commenting on terminal patients AFTER he realized that it was his most likely path to legalize live human experimentation, since he wasn’t having luck pushing through experiments on prisoners. Tellingly, 75% of his “subjects” weren’t terminal, and he picked his subjects for their publicity value rather than their circumstances.
It isn’t advocating for a rational adult’s freedom when a person talks about performing live experiments on infants with birth defects, people with treatable mental illnesses or cognitive disabilities, etc. If he truly was about mercy, then why has he openly stated that his hope is to experiment on & then kill them legally?
Also notable is that disabled (severe or non) people and those doing hospice care of the terminally ill — the folks with the most firsthand experience — are his biggest adversaries. We know better than anybody whether one can have a good life with various problems, what the real roadblocks to achieving one is, and when death actually makes sense (like when pain is beyond merely unbearable *and* there’s absolutely no way to control it).
Instead, his supporters are non-disabled, non-terminal folk that assume that our lives are so bad that only rare “strong” types can “tolerate” it. Their reaction is more akin to a child terrified of the dark: rather than try to find out what’s really there or listen when one of us tries to show them (then help us all fight to make sure it’s not made artificially worse), they fight for the right to run away screaming.
April 26th, 2010 | 11:54 am
“Terminal” is a term doctors bestow- or withhold, often for reasons having little to do with medicine-estimating that you have six months or fewer to live. “Non-terminal” does not mean not seriously ill. In Final Exit Network, it is both fact and prophecy: you have the disease that will eventually kill you,like Alzheimer’s, M.S., or ALS, but dying will be a long, hopeless, and painful deterioration, sometimes taking years. All of your resources- psychological and financial- will be poured into a bottomless pit, in a process and an outcome offering nothing but despair and heartache.
True: I don’t know Jack about Dr. K. as ghoul, and I question the “research” in this article. Look at the faces of the desperate people whom he helped; imagine one of those as your mother, husband, child, sibling.
There are some levels of suffering that lie beyond discussion.
April 26th, 2010 | 1:01 pm
“…mentally competent adults have a basic human right to end their lives when they suffer from a fatal or irreversible illness or intractable pain, when their quality of life is personally unacceptable, and the future holds only hopelessness and misery.”
Sounds like the life of a Cubs fan…except for the “mentally competent adult” part.
Links
Blogs
Find Us
Contact