The Right to Choose; Quality of Life and Death

Usually when the phrase, "The Right to Choose" is used, it’s the beginning of a Roe V. Wade debate. Not many know of Oregon's Death With Dignity Act:

On October 27, 1997 Oregon enacted the Death with Dignity Act which allows terminally-ill Oregonians to end their lives through the voluntary self-administration of lethal medications, expressly prescribed by a physician for that purpose. The Oregon Death with Dignity Act requires the Oregon Department of Human Services to collect information about the patients and physicians who participate in the Act, and publish an annual statistical report.

In 2006 the United States Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling that stated that "Death With Dignity protected a legitimate medical practice.” Of course, by this time Dr. Jack was one year away from being released from prison for a second degree murder conviction in which he assisted a terminally ill patient in committing suicide (by injecting the patient himself, as opposed to the patient taking the “final action). I point to a paragraph of the Hippocratic Oath that justifies the Dr. Kevorkian's actions:

I will respect the privacy of my patients, for their problems are not disclosed to me that the world may know. Most especially must I tread with care in matters of life and death. If it is given to me to save a life, all thanks. But it may also be within my power to take a life; this awesome responsibility must be faced with great humbleness and awareness of my own frailty. Above all, I must not play at God.

Dr. Kevorkian provided a medical service to patients that was not available to them; to stop being a patient. All of these people were of sound mind; with family members that may not have agreed with the decision, but respected the wishes of their loved ones. Bedside manner and hospice care for the terminally ill has changed for the better since Dr. Kevorkian; and I don't see anyone seeking to prosecute Congress for the assisted suicide of our economy. Sorry, I couldn't resist.

Back to the topic at hand, the right to choose. Many of us are currently without health insurance, PERIOD, and lack the financial means to be able to make any medical decisions that could possibly save our lives. If the best medical decision for a patient is to end their own suffering, is that not the same as denying treatment that could “possibly” cure them? The real problem society had with Dr. Kevorkian is that he made it clear that we will all die one day. Death wasn’t supposed to be viewed as a cure…and that was the cure that Dr. Kevorkian offered to end the pain and suffering involved with terminally ill patients. The great doctor often referred to his medical critics as, “hypocritic oafs;” because they could not see the big picture.

Dr. Kevorkian was the first to propose giving murderers condemned to die the option of being executed with anesthesia in order to subject their bodies to medical experimentation and allow the harvesting of their healthy organs. He delivered a paper on the subject to a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1958.

How can we call someone that had the foresight to advance medicine by way of soliciting organ donations from a previously untapped source, Dr. Death? As unlikely as this is, I believe that Dr. Kevorkian deserves a posthumous pardon.