The Chris Moeller Archives

A right to die

I was remiss in not acknowledging the passing of the euthanasia advocate, Dr. Jack Kevorkian, earlier this month. I decided to retrace my steps after reading the recent Stefan Kanfer biography of Humphrey Bogart (“Tough Without a Gun”). The author’s descriptions of the last few months of Bogie’s life in 1956 and early ‘57 after the actor had been diagnosed with esophageal cancer were plainly horrifying. During surgery to remove the growing tumor, he was sliced open diagonally across his body from shoulder to hip. Then during his recovery from the strenuous operation, his coughing fits—already extreme and alarming to others before surgery—caused him to literally cough his stitches loose and they had to be resewn. By the time he slipped into a coma months later, and following a second futile surgical attempt to excise the tumor, one of Hollywood’s most iconic figures and an enduring embodiment of the toughness adjective had dropped in weight to under 80 pounds. His young son and daughter were kept from him in his final days because of his concerns, and his wife’s concerns, that the children would only remember their father as a frail, dying man.

I thought of these passages again when I researched online news reports of Dr. Kervorkian’s death back on June 3rd, and I came across this comment from Ned McGrath, the communications director of Detroit, Michigan’s Archdiocese: “It is both ironic and tragic that Kevorkian himself was afforded a dignified, natural death in a hospital, something he denied to those who came to him in desperation, only to be poisoned and have their bodies left in places such as vans and motel rooms.”

To which I say: Fuck you, Ned McGrath. I cannot imagine a more upside-down and misrepresented assessment of Dr. Kevorkian’s principled and unselfish medical work than that. McGrath's skewed statement belongs in the sewer next to the argument that the ordination of women into the clergy is a moral offense equal to the raping of children. It belongs next to the defense that people in the developing world should be denied contraceptive devices when they’re dying by the millions-- mostly poor and powerless women-- from unprotected, and often forceable sex and sexually-transmitted disease. It falls in next to the idea that one person's religion can dictate whom another person chooses to love and marry. McGrath is certainly familiar with these other opinions. He's paid to promote them. Speaking in his professional capacity, as he was earlier this month, it makes him a less than ideal candidate to offer worthy perspective on the dignity of life and death, or about what exactly it is that poisons us.

Jack Kevorkian is one of the heroic figures of our time-- indeed, a man far ahead of it. While it’s generally understood that his celebrated right-to-die efforts posed a monumental challenge to a lagging legal system in this specific area of jurisprudence, it’s less often acknowledged that his work was also designed to serve as a damning indictment of his own profession. His was the argument that a doctor has the duty to serve his or her patient above all else. Not the business of medicine. Not peripheral cultural interests. And not any perceptions of an omnipotent, incorporeal being or mythology.

It’s rather pathetic to consider that through several years of very high-profile activity and the advocacy of a rather widespread and not-at-all-uncommon societal attitude about euthanasia, Kevorkian carried the banner of ethics in this area almost-singlehandedly in the United States. The rest of the medical field remained-- you’ll pardon the expression-- dead silent. It's collective arrogance by his colleagues to claim that Kevorkian is the only physician "playing God" in the field when that's precisely what medical persons are required to do almost every day of their working lives. Sadly, the right of the individual to determine how much they have to suffer before dying does not exist in this country, yet doctors are allowed to employ the preferred method of death of the Nazi concentration camps by starving and thirsting their comatose patients to death, sometimes over the course of days, and even weeks. This is unconscionable.

Many of Kevorkian’s patients had not been diagnosed “terminal” cases, this is true. But almost by definition of the intent, the longing for death by these individuals was often heightened by the fact that their “natural” end was not imminent. A period of continued suffering was often indeterminate. It’s also true, as Dr. Kevorkian once stated, that “we’re all terminal” from a very legitimate perspective.

Since the peak of Kevorkian’s advocacy in the late '90s, three U.S. states have legalized physician-assisted suicide, but even on this short list, the individual state laws each restrict the action to “terminal” cases. The level of physical pain cannot be a motivating factor. The combination of a medically-diagnosed sound mind and the principle of self-determination is legally meaningless.

Humphrey Bogart was one of the toughest of them all, but the thought certainly must have crossed his mind at some point to put an early end to his suffering, and this was a very different time in our history. Another tough guy, former NFL star Dave Duerson, suffered from crippling and unceasing headaches, a symptom of a concussion-related neurodegenerative disease that stemmed from his football career. Seeking permanent relief, he shot himself to death in the chest in February. He chose his heart as his gun's target, rather than his head, because he knew that it was important for other football players to have scientists be able to study his brain and his illness. A bullet shouldn't have been needed at all.

We're a very long way from where our laws and our values need to be. Religious ethics are drowning out medical ethics in our country's hospitals, and our pathological fear of death is suppressing freedom, reason, and our very humanity.

posted by CM @ 11:33 PM