Kevorkian About to Be Released

"[Jack]Kevorkian's release may actually be bad news for assisted-suicide advocacy. Since his imprisonment for the 1998 murder of Thomas Youk, advocates for assisted-suicide legalization have strived mightily to put a benign, professional veneer on the hard business of authorizing doctors to intentionally participate in the termination of their patients' lives. With Kevorkian in prison, his gaunt visage was no longer the public face of the movement. Today's activists are far more likely to be impeccably dressed, upper middle class women who spout focus-group-vetted sound bites. (Hence the effort by the former Hemlock Society--renamed Compassion & Choices--to convince the media to drop the descriptive term "assisted suicide" for the pabulum phrase "aid in dying.")
     From "Dr. Death Rides Again: Jack Kevorkian's movement has done better without him," in the Weekly Standard.

The exceedingly thoughtful, myth-busting essay from which this excerpt is drawn can be read at www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Protected/Articles/000/000/013/698wvgcj.asp. The article, co-authored by Wesley J. Smith, a keynote speaker at the upcoming NRLC '2007 convention, does its best work at illustrating that the freelance work pioneered by "Dr. Death" would not necessarily be precluded by Oregon's "Death With Dignity" law. In other words, proponents of the law insisted every day and twice on Sunday that there are "safeguards" in place. Well…

To take just one example cited in the Weekly Standard essay, to this day many accounts insist Kevorkian "helped" terminally ill patients. But since assisted suicide is illegal in Michigan, authorities checked.

"[A]utopsies performed revealing that more than half of Kevorkian's 130 known victims were not terminally ill. Most were disabled with conditions such as multiple sclerosis. In fact, several had no serious physical illnesses that could be determined upon autopsy."

How about in Oregon? To "qualify," the patient is supposed to have a terminal condition, "defined as a life expectancy of six months or less," according to the Weekly Standard.  Okay, of the 292 reported deaths under the law, "how many of those who died actually had a terminal condition? Nobody knows. Oregon does not require autopsies of people who die there by legalized assisted suicide, so we don't know their actual underlying conditions."

There are many more probing examples, particularly relating to Kevorkian's zip in, zip out style. We read that,  "Good Morning America noted that many of the people over whose deaths Kevorkian presided died within 24 hours of meeting him for the first time."

In Oregon? "Although a patient's requests for assisted suicide purportedly must span a 15-day period, official Oregon reports indicate that, over the last seven years, some patients have died by suicide having known their assisting doctors for a week or less."

As you would expect, Kevorkian is scheduled to be interviewed on CBS's 60 Minutes this Sunday. They loved him the first time around, and will doubtless be sympathetic this time around. His attorney, Mayer Morganroth, was not exaggerating when he told USA Today, "He's going to be interviewed by everybody and his brother."