ROYAL OAK, MI – Recently, when I was writing a column about the shift in power from baby boomers to later generations, I was struck by something Dr. Jack Kevorkian once said to me.
That was back in the early 1990s, when he had been temporarily jailed for his role in one of the many flamboyant physician-assisted suicides over which he presided. Kevorkian, in case you’ve forgotten, was an international sensation back then.
He believed strongly that if you were doomed to a life of physical suffering that couldn’t be relieved, you should have the right to ask a doctor to help you die.
I asked him, on that long-ago night, if he thought what he did would ever be fully legal. “Yes, I do,” he told me. “But not for the right reasons.” I asked what he meant by that.
“You’re a baby boomer, aren’t you?” he said. “There are more than 70 million of you and a lot fewer in the next generation. Do you think they are going to want to spend all their money to keep you on machines and tubes when all of you are old? They won’t!
That was Kevorkian — in your face, sometimes theatrical, obnoxious, over the top. Other times he could be brilliant, thoughtful, whimsical even charming. But was he wrong?
I thought of Kevorkian again, realizing with a jolt that he died exactly ten years ago this week, four years after he was released after serving eight years in prison for second-degree murder.
He was never convicted of assisted suicide. Five times prosecutors brought charges against him for that, and in each case, juries refused to convict him. After the most zealous anti-Kevorkian prosecutor was defeated in a reelection battle fought over that issue, other Michigan prosecutors let it be known that they regarded his assisted suicides as de facto legal.
But Kevorkian, a pathologist who never married, had no family and cared nothing for money, had a self-destructive streak. In September, 1998 he insisted on upping the ante and performing euthanasia on a patient, rather than helping the man end his own life.
For good measure he videotaped the act, and gave the video to 60 Minutes. When he was charged with murder, he also fired Geoffrey Fieger, the brilliant lawyer who had defended him, and attempted to represent himself, with disastrous consequences.
What may have been surprising, even to him, is how quickly Jack Kevorkian was then forgotten. He had been a sensation for a few years, with his face on the cover of Time magazine and his name filling headlines, until April 1999, when he went to prison.
“Prisoners,” a prosecutor said the day he was led away, “don’t get to have televised press conferences.” Other news events soon followed, and after Sept. 11, 2001, people didn’t talk much about the right to die. Pro-right to die groups dwindled.
When Kevorkian was finally paroled in June, 2007, it was on the condition that he would not only not take part in any assisted suicides or euthanasia; he had to agree not to even consult others or talk about physician-assisted deaths for two years.
With that, his career as “Dr. Death” came to an end. He lived mostly quietly for the next four years, occasionally lecturing or appearing on TV, and writing an obscure book on the Ninth Amendment. He made a quixotic run for Congress as an independent, but got less than three percent of the vote.
He finally died of kidney disease, liver cancer and a thrombosis, and showed no signs of wanting assisted suicide for himself.
But though it might appear that his crusade failed, that isn’t completely true. Allowing a suffering patient to commit suicide with medical assistance was illegal everywhere in 1990, when he told his first patient, Janet Adkins, to “have a nice trip” as she pushed a button on his suicide machine in his battered Volkswagen van.
But today, nine states and the District of Columbia have passed “Death with Dignity” acts that allow doctors in some cases to assist patients who want to die. In a tenth state, Montana, the state supreme court has said nothing in state law prevents it.
The hospice movement, which tries to allow people to die as comfortably as possible, was given a huge boost by Kevorkian, as the New York Times noted when he died: “All generally agreed that his stubborn and often intemperate advocacy of assisted suicide helped spur the growth of hospice care in the United States,” a reporter wrote. He forced doctors to get more involved in pain management as well. When his videotaped consultations with his patients were played in court, they often contained testimony about callous doctors who were unwilling to do much to relieve suffering.
Thirty years after Kevorkian’s name became a household word, no other physician has come forth to assume his mantle, though it is commonly believed that many doctors surreptitiously help suffering patients speed their deaths.
But there are still many Americans whose lives are misery, and who do not live in or near a state that allows physician-assisted suicide. (There are none in the entire Midwest.)
I think the issue Kevorkian raised with me so long ago is likely to face us again, perhaps with even more urgency than before.
-30- (Editor’s Note: A version of this column was published in the Toledo Blade.
