Seventy-nine year old Jack Kevorkian was released from prison after 8 years. Kevorkian strikes me as a practitioner of civil disobedience in the mold of David Thoreau and those who followed him. It’s appropriate that Kevorkian went to jail, but his fight is not without merit. At root, he stands for the proposition that all humans should have the right to terminate their own lives. And, they should be able to do it legally, with dignity, and without pain. Perhaps I’m just projecting my own beliefs onto him. There are many who object to the unregulated, illegal way Kevorkian was going about his assisted suicides. But, the fact is, there was no regulated, legal way to assist people.
There are a lot of pitfalls to be avoided. Protections need to be in place to ensure that the person choosing death is competent to make the choice and that others, including the death practitioner, are not unduly influencing the decision. In most cases, personally, I think suicide is the coward’s way out. But, there are definitely situations where that is not the case. If, for example, you have nothing but an extended future of unrelenting pain to look forward to, it’s cruel of society to force continued life on a person.
It sounds like, now that he’s out of prison, the more visible aspects of Kevorkian’s fight are over. He says he will continue to advocate for his cause, but he will do so legally.
Despite Kevorkian’s efforts, I don’t think the debate has advanced much over the past 20 years. Maybe it never will.
I agree with your position for the most part.
But off that specific topic, it seems to me that there is an opportunity here for government. Right now, “lethal injection” is being challenged on a few fronts. Mostly due to the need to modify drug dosages due to several variables, including patient weight, presence of liver disease, etc. This combined with physicians not wanting to participate in executions. It appears that Dr. Kevorkian’s method is cheap, easy for the user to administer with minimal training, and voluntarily submitted to by the user resulting in a peaceful death. Could this be an execution method that would lead to less legal challenges?