I’m not sure what’s more disturbing in this story: the support for doctor-assisted suicide, or the inability to see Jack Kevorkian as the poster boy for the inevitable abuse of such a practice:
More than two-thirds of Americans believe there are circumstances in which a patient should be allowed to die, but they are closely divided on whether it should be legal for a doctor to help terminally ill patients end their own lives by prescribing fatal drugs, a new AP-Ipsos poll finds.
The results were released Tuesday, just days before Dr. Jack Kevorkian is freed from a Michigan prison after serving more than eight years for second-degree murder in the poisoning of a man with Lou Gehrig’s disease.
Kevorkian’s defiant assisted suicide campaign, which he waged for years before his conviction, fueled nationwide debate about patients’ ”right to die” and the role that physicians should play.
Though demonized by his critics as a callous killer, Kevorkian — who is to be released Friday — maintains relatively strong public support. The AP-Ipsos poll found that 53 percent of those surveyed thought he should not have been jailed; 40 percent supported his imprisonment. The results were similar to an ABC News poll in 1999 that found 55 percent disagreeing with his conviction.
There was no “demonization” of Kevorkian, simply a factual description of the actions of the man who reveled in the nickname “Dr. Death.” Kevorkian is a ghoul whose obsession with death led him to provide aid-in-dying services to dozens of people, lots of whom were not terminally ill, some of whom were simply depressed, none of whom he was interested in helping as a physician; he preferred to be their second-hand executioner (and I expect the second-hand part was nothing more than an attempt to evade a murder conviction). How anyone can continue to think that he deserved to be walking around loose escapes me.
The new AP-Ipsos poll asked whether it should be legal for doctors to prescribe lethal drugs to help terminally ill patients end their own lives — a practice currently allowed in Oregon but in no other states. Forty-eight percent said it should be legal; 44 percent said it should be illegal.
I think a spokesman for the California Medical Association put it well when he commented on a proposal for the Golden State to emulate Oregon, “Physicians look at it as the ultimate abandonment of a patient,” said medical association spokesman Ron Lopp. “That’s not the physician’s role, to aggressively hasten death.” The potential for abuse is enormous, the slippery slope to forced euthanasia is greasy (as the Netherlands experiment in allowing doctors to decide when patients’ live are no longer worth living demonstrates), and the practice itself is wrong, both because of the immorality of suicide (from the Christian standpoint, it is the ultimate denial of God’s sovereignty over life) and because it turns doctors into instruments of death rather than of healing.
There’s an interesting divide between those who believe doctor-assisted suicide should be allowed and those who don’t:
Only 34 percent of those who attend religious services at least once a week think it should be legal for doctors to help terminally ill patients end their own lives. In contrast, 70 percent of those who never attend religious services thought the practice should be legal.
Just 23 percent of those who attend religious services at least weekly would consider ending their own lives if terminally ill, compared to 49 percent of those who never attend religious services.
To a significant degree, the division is about whether we see ourselves at the center of the universe or God; responsible to no one but ourselves or to God; morally autonomous beings who are our own ultimate authority, or creations of a loving God who has directed how to live. As in so many issues facing society these days (abortion, gay rights, embryonic stem cell research, genetic engineering, etc.) this is the divide that matters most.
UPDATE: If you’re in the mood for a horror story. read Wesley Smith’s account of what Jack Kevorkian was really interested in during his death-dealing rampage. Hint: it wasn’t compassion toward the terminally ill.
May 30, 2007 at 3:49 pm
I think it is important in this debate to distinguish between actions of a physician that allow a patient to decline medical intervention, either by means of advanced directives or direct instructions from the hospital bed, so that “nature can take its course,” and the actions of a physician to actively end the life of a patient who requests assisted suicide. Unfortunately, these two (in my opinion) very different things are brought together in the polling referenced above, creating some confusion. Theologically, I see no problem with the former, but many problems with the latter.
May 30, 2007 at 4:16 pm
Agreed. The distinction is absolutely crucial, but an awful lot of people see none at all.
May 30, 2007 at 9:34 pm
I agree with you pastor, except – right now, I am watching my mother die a slow death from stage four lung and ovarian cancer. She is in a palliative care hospital, and is being well taken care of, but it is still an institution. To watch someone you love being eaten from the inside out by this horrid disease is so, so hard. I really can understand why some terminally ill people would choose to end their own lives.
June 1, 2007 at 9:20 am
Note, I said understand, not condone.
June 1, 2007 at 9:31 am
I understand as well. I’ve ministered to my share of parishioners and their families going through that, and I definitely understand how that can seem like a reasonable option.
My father committed suicide in 2001, six months after my mother died following a long illness that left him as her sole caregiver. He was in decent physical condition, but was apparently depressed because he had lost his purpose in life. I’m sure that colors my view of the issue as well, though I’d thought Kevorkian was a monster for years before that.
June 1, 2007 at 12:12 pm
Oh, I’m sorry. That’s a heavy load for those who are left behind.