Can America Stop The Tide Of Assisted Suicide?
By CRAIG TURNER
(Editor’s Note: Craig Turner is a graduate of the English honors program at the University of Texas and a former journalist who covered Capitol Hill. Since 1990, he has served as director of communications for three Washington, D.C., companies. Turner is the author of two books recently published by Saint Benedict Press: Words of Faith and Words of Hope.
(This column is copyright © 2015 by Craig Turner and the Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation, www.fgfBooks.com. All rights reserved.)
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Several states have measures on their ballots that, if passed, will legalize assisted suicide in those states. The dangers of social ills such as drug addiction, alcoholism, and pornography have received much attention lately, but assisted suicide, unlike those others, has rich lobbyists and wealthy benefactors. Billionaire atheist George Soros, one of the seven richest people in America, funds assisted suicide projects and even declared in a 1994 speech that he had offered to help his own mother commit suicide.
The sad irony is that assisted suicide is the most depraved of the social ills; the others are of no consequence to a person who is already dead.
The wealthy defenders of assisted suicide, such as Soros, claim the issue is about helping to stop the pain of the terminally ill. But morphine and other drugs take away pain, so why not resort to them? To see whether the promoters of assisted suicide are really simply trying to eliminate pain, let’s take a look at the most famous advocate, Jack Kevorkian.
To get started in his business, Kevorkian placed the following ad in a Detroit newspaper in March 1990: “Oppressed by a fatal disease, a severe handicap, a crippling deformity? Write Box 261, Royal Oak, Michigan 48068-0261. Show him proper compelling medical evidence that you should die, and Dr. Jack Kevorkian will help you kill yourself free of charge.”
One should note that even in the beginning, Kevorkian was not targeting just the terminally ill, but the handicapped as well. Pain is not even mentioned in his ad. Twenty-three of Kevorkian’s 25 victims from June 1990 to August 1995 were killed by being gassed with carbon monoxide, the same method used by the Nazis to kill Jews. Like the Nazis, who beginning in 1941 used vans as mobile killing units to gas their victims, Kevorkian killed many of his first victims in an old van.
Kevorkian’s first victim was Janet Adkins, a 54-year-old who was suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer’s. Her own doctor stated that she had at least ten years of productive life ahead of her. Adkins’ aunt stated that being a burden to her family was the real fear and motivator for her taking her life. This is the case for many if not most people who take their own lives: It is not pain that they are afraid of, but being a burden to others.
Kevorkian’s second victim was Marjorie Wantz, who had no life-threatening condition, and an autopsy found that she had no illness or disease in her body. Pelvic pain, which more than one physician had said was manageable, was her complaint. She had previously been hospitalized for psychiatric care on a number of occasions and had been taking extremely large doses of Halcion, which impairs judgment, prior to her suicide.
Sherry Miller, Kevorkian’s third victim, had MS and died at age 43. Her fear was that she was becoming a burden to her family, but she refused to take the medication that was prescribed to treat her depression. Kevorkian tried to kill her with a lethal dose of drugs, but after repeated failures to properly puncture her arm, he left her at the site so he could go into town to buy supplies to gas her to death. Four hours later he gassed her with carbon monoxide.
And so the list goes on. Studies of Kevorkian’s patients have shown that most were not terminally ill. Autopsies showed that many of his victims had no disease at all and, according to a study in the New England Journal of Medicine, fully three-quarters were not terminally ill. Only about a third were in pain and some of his victims suffered only from treatable depression or even hypochondria.
Like the Nazis who performed experiments on Jews, Kevorkian wrote several journal articles advocating experiments on condemned prisoners — experiments that would intentionally kill them. He expressed his desire to assist in the deaths of 20 and 30-year-olds who were not even ill or in pain, but who “just don’t want to live anymore.” In order to get around the issue that his patients were not terminal, Kevorkian tried to claim that any disease that curtails life even for one day should be considered terminal.
The assisted-suicide movement has enormous sums of money and a new image: The Hemlock Society, for example, has been renamed Compassion and Choices, a friendlier moniker. This change is designed to seduce the public into believing that their goal is to help the American people, but often people are not fooled. Kevorkian, the poster boy for the movement to legalize assisted suicide, spent eight years in prison after being convicted of second-degree murder and then was released due to bad health in 2007.
He was subsequently diagnosed with liver cancer, but despite declining health and cancer in his own body, he didn’t commit suicide or ask for a rusty van loaded with carbon monoxide. He simply lived out his life to its natural end.
The most famous recent advocate of assisted suicide has been Brittany Maynard, who tragically took her own life after being diagnosed with glioblastoma cancer. The saddest irony of this dreadful tale is that only months after she took her life, scientists announced that a cure for the very cancer she had seems to have been found.
Several weeks ago 60 Minutes aired the discovery of a “near miraculous” treatment that uses polio as a catalyst to attack the same cancer that infected her. The most recent participants in clinical trials using this treatment have been found to be clear of cancer. Unfortunately, Mrs. Maynard is no longer with us to receive treatment.
Many new groups, such as those found at www.notdeadyet.org and www.noassistedsuicideca.org, are fighting the rich assisted suicide movement, but need more financial support. And so as bills move through state legislatures threatening the lives of the elderly and infirm, one has to wonder whether a suicidal civilization now has the capacity to stop them.
