It may have been a while since you gave much thought to Jack Kevorkian. In the 1990s “Dr. Death” helped (by his own count) some 130 people shuffle off this mortal coil as part of his assisted suicide apostolate. His April 1999 imprisonment removed the now-78-year-old from the front pages, but he recently rematerialized in an interview published in the Detroit News.
Kevorkian is not only old but, according to his attorneys, so sick that he may well not survive to his spring 2007 parole hearing. In a written interview, Kevorkian answered the Detroit News' query about his current views by defending the righteousness of assisted suicide, but says he himself would not choose to put an end to his life.
This is interesting because it is hard to imagine Kevorkian in his glory days not egging on someone in his own present condition. Old, imprisoned, and (in the words of his lawyers) a “walking cadaver,” Kevorkian today certainly seems to fit the bill of someone who'd be better off dead. Many of his former patient/victims were in no worse straits, and where Jack saw “irremedial pain and suffering,” he thought it best to cut to the chase. They were going to die anyway, so why not hasten the inevitable in the interests of pity?
This view is unabashedly shared by many people, but more to the point, it enlists the sneaking sympathy of many more of us, which is why Kevorkian was able to ply his trade for so long and so publicly before being successfully prosecuted. Several years later, the Terri Schiavo case shone the spotlight on our national ambivalence toward assisted suicide. Many people who would identify their values as conservative could be heard muttering, “Why won't they let her die in peace?” during Schiavo's agonizingly long death. Others defended her right not to be tortured to death by food and water deprivation, but cringed at her severe disabilities. It is difficult to convince our imaginations that we could ever find life a good under circumstances such as hers.
Not surprisingly, many doctors feel this way too, and some of them are unencumbered by a commitment to the sanctity of human life. We see them at work in Melissa Tankard Reist's new book Defiant Birth: Women Who Resist Medical Eugenics.
Reist collects the experiences of women who were advised, urged, cajoled, and threatened because their doctors (and other health professionals) believed that abortion was the only solution to their less-than-perfect unborn babies. Some of the mothers were shown the door by their doctors when they refused to abort children prenatally diagnosed as disabled; some were repeatedly lectured at during subsequent prenatal visits. One was duped into “inducing birth” at 20 weeks pregnancy, under the illusion that her baby, diagnosed with heart and other problems, might survive and be successfully treated. The baby died, and she later learned that some babies with the same diagnosis did quite well when properly cared for.
Several other women profiled in Reist's book were assured that prenatal tests conclusively showed severe handicaps, and then gave birth to healthy babies or ones less disabled than originally diagnosed. But even the babies who entered the world with severe strikes against them were welcomed, loved, and cared for by these women (and other family members) who increasingly are viewed by society as “medical outlaws.”
Dr. Kevorkian would know what to do for them, and if he'd focused on the pre-born instead of the pre-dead, he could have done it quite legally. The villains in Reist's book are people who (understandably) flinch from the pain of other people's struggles with radical imperfection, but then respond by disposing of the disabled babies who make them feel this way. What, after all, would the world be like if all of us truly allowed our hearts to be painfully stretched and our minds vertiginously broadened by the idea that personal autonomy and high productivity — though they are goods — are not requirements of a life worth living? What new heavens and new earth await us on the far side of such an understanding?
Meanwhile, as Flannery O'Connor trenchantly observed, secular “compassion” leads inevitably to the gas chamber.
Madame X works in Washington DC for the federal government. Because of her employer, she must write under a pseudonym.
