Subject:  Right-to-die movement will outlast Kevorkian |
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Date Posted: 12/18/06 8:07pm
Published: December 14. 2006 in the Metro Detroit
Written by the great BRIAN DICKERSON, FREE PRESS COLUMNIST:
Right-to-die movement will outlast Kevorkian
Michigan's oldest prisoner of war is going free, assuming he lives long enough to totter out the door of his minimum-security prison in June.
It's not that Jack Kevorkian's war is over, really; it's just that he has ceased to play any significant role in it.
In a saner world, Michigan taxpayers would have been relieved of the responsibility for the 78-year-old Kevorkian's room and board years ago, when his deteriorating health rendered him incapable of resuming his singular medical practice.
But with a gubernatorial election in the offing, even a diminished Dr. Death remained too potent a political symbol to be a suitable candidate for executive clemency. So the governor let the parole process take its glacial course, setting the stage for Wednesday's anticlimactic announcement.
Released on parole? Honestly, how many Michigan residents recalled, before they heard the news, that Dr. Death was still among the living?
You could make the case that Kevorkian's lifelong campaign to change the way Americans think about death has been dead in the water since then-Oakland Circuit Judge Jessica Cooper sent him to the hoosegow back in 1998.
Physician-assisted suicide remains illegal in 49 states. The U.S. Supreme Court seems further than ever from recognizing a constitutional right to die, and even the court-sanctioned suspension of life-sustaining treatment can still occasion a national convulsion, as it did in the death of Terri Schiavo.
But if champions of assisted suicide failed to deliver any legal revolution to rival Roe v. Wade, their opponents haven't fared much better.
Former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, whose determination to banish euthanasia matched Kevorkian's zeal to legalize it, was stymied in his attempt to shut down Oregon's pioneering experiment in physician-assisted suicide. More than 240 Oregon residents have ended their lives with lawfully obtained prescription drugs under the state's 9-year-old Death with Dignity Act.
Even more significant is the change in the medical profession's posture toward patients who are terminally ill or challenged by chronic pain.
Long before Kevorkian burst onto the scene in 1990, some physicians were discreetly dispensing pain medication in sufficient dosages to hasten the death of terminally ill patients.
The risk of prosecution has always made the phenomenon hard to quantify, and Kevorkian's experience certainly hasn't encouraged a candid public discussion. But his public crusade unleashed a consumer demand for more compassionate end-of-life care. No physician I've talked to believes physician-assisted suicide ended with Kevorkian's incarceration, and there is reason to believe it has become more common -- albeit under the guise of aggressive pain management, since Kevorkian has been out of circulation.
The legal debate over euthanasia will continue, and Kevorkian's moment (and Michigan's) at the epicenter of it is probably over for good. But wherever he spends his final days, Kevorkian can rest assured the market forces he set in motion will survive him.
Contact BRIAN DICKERSON at 248-351-3697 or bdickerson@freepress.com.
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