I have embedded the trailer for the upcoming puff HBO bio of the murderer Jack Kevorkian, entitled, You Don’t Know Jack, at the bottom of this post. Before viewing it, take a look at a few of the key aspects of Kevorkian’s “career” that I have listed below. Anyone want to bet whether the movie will bring these facts up?
1. Before assisting the suicides of disabled, terminally ill, and the non sick despairing, Kevorkian went to most prisons where executions are conducted asking to experiment on condemned prisoners.
2. He never limited his killing practice to people with terminal illnesses. About 70% were disabled. Five of Kevorkian’s patients were not sick upon autopsy.
3. Kevorkian took the kidneys from one assisted suicide victim–a man with quadriplegia–and held a press conference offering them “first come, first served.”
4. Janet Good (played by Susan Sarandon), conspired with Kevorkian in his reign of lawlessness, even planning to help kill a patient and then, with Kevorkian, rush the cadaver into a hospital, so organs could be procured. (They never carried out the plan). She committed assisted suicide and her autopsy showed that her pancreatic cancer was not near the terminal stage.
5. Kevorkian did not care much about alleviating the suffering of patients, (he once said he couldn’t remember their names) but rather called it “a first step, an early distasteful professional obligation” toward obtaining a license to engage in human experimentation, writing further:
What I find most satisfying is the prospect of making possible the performance of invaluable experiments or other beneficial acts under conditions that this first unpleasant step can help establish–in a word, obitiatry–as defined earlier.” [Kevorkian liked to coin terms. Obitiatry is the word he invented to describe experimenting on people as part of the practice of human euthanasia.)
6. Kevorkian wanted to experiment on the brains and nervous systems of people he was euthanizing, writing in his 1991 book Prescription Medicide:
If we are ever to penetrate the mystery of death–even superficially–it will have to be through obitiatry…But knowledge about the essence of human death will of necessity require insight into the nature of the unique awareness of consciousness that characterizes cognitive human life. That is possible only through obitiatric research on living human bodies, and most likely by concentrating on the central nervous system
Jack Kevorkian is a dangerous nut who should be shunned, not celebrated. But you won’t see any of this in the movie, because HBO, the producers, and Pacino don’t know Jack. And the worst part is that they–and the popular media generally–don’t want to know Jack. They have a story they want to tell and facts would just get in the way.
April 7th, 2010 | 1:46 pm
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April 7th, 2010 | 2:26 pm
Do people realize that this criminal puke wasn’t even an MD?
Wesley J. Smith Reply:
April 7th, 2010 at 4:03 pm
Deeptoad: Actually, he is. Once out of residency, he never practiced medicine on living patients. He was a pathologist.
April 7th, 2010 | 7:10 pm
Folks,
Check out his body of work:
http://www.arianagallery.com/kevorkian.php
and look at what he publishes:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2561859/?page=1
April 8th, 2010 | 9:57 am
What does that mean, “the real thing”? I am so sick of meaningless statements being profferred as if they’re, well, meaningful.
April 8th, 2010 | 1:49 pm
My God!
Save us all!
http://www.arianagallery.com/photos/kevorkian/for-he-is-raised.html
April 8th, 2010 | 9:47 pm
The logic of the ”right to die” movement is: you have a ”right” to control your own body,therefore, you have a right to kill yourself, for any reason. This is chilling, and Kevorkian is applying this logic with considerable consistency. What we need, is an argument that accepts that one has a right to control one’s body, (since this is reasonable), but that does NOT entail the ”right” to kill oneself.
April 9th, 2010 | 9:59 am
Bret Lythgoe writes: “What we need, is an argument that accepts that one has a right to control one’s body, (since this is reasonable), but that does NOT entail the ‘right’ to kill oneself.”
Now that’s kind of like being “a little bit pregnant.” You either are or you aren’t. One either HAS the right to control his body or he HASN’T the right. If he hasn’t, then it follows that someone or some entity has a superior right than his. We commonly call that sort of thing “slavery.”
Just as freedom of speech implies the right to remain silent, and freedom of religion the right to have no religion at all, so one’s “right to life” implies the ability to decide if, for how long, and under what circumstances he will continue to live.
And so I would ask Mr. Lythgoe: who do you say has this superior right to your body, and whence does it come?
April 12th, 2010 | 8:26 pm
HistoryWriter: We all are aware of those who engage in behavior that, based on the notion that they have a right to control their own bodies, we allow, but know, is very bad for them. We are morally obligated, I think, to protect people, even from themselves. If we conclude that the right to control one’s own body is the ONLY, and ABSOLUTE right, that can never be superseded by other moral claims, such as the good of the person involved, then we have no moral or logical recourse with someone, say, who wants to kill himself and sell his body to science, to obtain money to send his daughter to college. How could you logically object to this, if the right to control one’s body rules all? My point is that the right to control one’s body, is valid, but to prevent the above problem, and others, we must devise a way to coherently synthesize the right to control one’s body, with the equally valid claim, to protect the good of the person, even from themselves. We do allow these notions to exist pragmatically now, but my hope, is to LOGICALLY show that they not only are consistent, but one entails the other. As far as I know, no one has done this yet.
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