Jack Kevorkian Dead at 83

theodp writes "Jack Kevorkian, the pathologist said to have had a role in more than 130 assisted suicides, has died from kidney-related complications on the eve of the 21st anniversary of his first assisted suicide. Kevorkian, who served more than eight years in prison for second-degree murder, had his story told in the HBO movie You Don't Know Jack. His antics and personality brought a certain approachability to a grim subject — the fundamental right of terminally ill patients to choose to die. 'I will debate so-called ethicists,' he once said. 'They are not even ethicists. They are propagandists. I will argue with them if they will allow themselves to be strapped to a wheelchair for 72 hours so they can't move, and they are catheterized and they are placed on the toilet and fed and bathed. Then they can sit in a chair and debate with me.' RIP, Dr. Jack."

Comments

In b4 losers asking why he didn't kill himself

[Qzukk]

Why would he have killed himself, when he didn't have a terminal illness and was actually expected to recover?

Even if he was hospitalized with a terminal illness and in pain, who would have helped him kill himself?

Re:In b4 losers asking why he didn't kill himself

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if he was terminally ill, why should he be expected to end his life? Did he promote euthenasia, or choice of euthenasia?

Captcha: altruism

Re:In b4 losers asking why he didn't kill himself

[KiloByte]

He wasn't rendered helpless by his illness -- until his last visit to the hospital shortly before his death. And if this bout of illness would be staved off, he'd have a few more years of mostly fully able life. Most of us have some illness a good part of their lives -- be that bad blood pressure, diabetes, allergy or whatever else. He did succumb to his kidney problems, but was more able at the age of 83 than most of you will be.

On the other hand, those who are rendered helpless -- trapped in a body that no longer works -- do suffer for no good reason. When you can't move on your own, have to fed and have your poo cleaned by others, and most importantly, have no hope of it ever getting better -- you're effectively in the most cruel jail.

Re:In b4 losers asking why he didn't kill himself

[UnderCoverPenguin]

On the other hand, those who are rendered helpless -- trapped in a body that no longer works -- do suffer for no good reason. When you can't move on your own, have to fed and have your poo cleaned by others, and most importantly, have no hope of it ever getting better -- you're effectively in the most cruel jail.

Certainly I do not want to be put in this awful position. However, my concern is that if doctor assisted suicide is legalized, the insurance companies will be significantly less motivated to treat seriously ill patients who choose to live. And eventually, even before they get to this stage.

(We already have "quality of life" decisions being made before treatment options are presented to patients. Those who are perceived to have "too low a quality of life" are only offered palliative treatments.)

Re:In b4 losers asking why he didn't kill himself

[Rich0]

Personally, I doubt the motivation of health insurance companies would at all be driven by the ability of patients to kill themselves (which to some extent is an option many already have). At some point insurance companies stop paying for heroic measures anyway, and I doubt that the legal availability would impact that.

Now, the consumer demand for insurance that covers more desperate treatments might very well drop if euthanasia becomes more socially acceptable, and that might impact what insurance companies are willing to cover. That is a bit more indirect than what you are suggesting.

Most people don't realize it, but EVERY insurance company puts a price on life - and that includes national healthcare systems as well. If a $100k procedure would extend your life of an 85 year old quadriplegic by one day no insurance system on this planet would pay the bill. If the same procedure was likely to give a 15 year old a normal healthy lifespan (vs death in a few weeks) chances are most insurance systems would pay it (even private insurance in the US). The basic algorithm looks at how a treatment extends your life and/or improves the quality of your life - the more it does both the more it is allowed to cost. In the end everybody puts a price on life - we just don't like to talk about it.

Re:In b4 losers asking why he didn't kill himself

[cold fjord]

Did he promote euthenasia, or choice of euthenasia?

Both, and much more.....

Dr. Kevorkian’s views on euthanasia do not stop at “planned death,” but build to an ultimate conclusion. This is probably best expressed in the articles he has written over the years for the professional journal, Medicine and Law. In 1986 he wrote on human experimentation:

The so-called Nuremberg Code and all its derivatives completely ignore the extraordinary opportunities for terminal experimentation on humans facing imminent and inevitable death. . . . Intense emotionalism engendered by the concentration camp atrocities of World War II has unfairly stigmatized this honorable concept and cloaked it in silence. . . .

. . . Now that the benumbed sense of objective appraisal manifested by the Nuremberg judges has begun to wear off, at last it is conceded that they were wrong in concluding that nothing of value resulted from the illegal experiments. . . . The data are all the more valuable because similar human experiments can never again be done. Therefore, it seems reasonable to conclude that a few of the medical criminals did the right thing (extraction of positive gain from inevitably total loss otherwise beyond their influence) but in the wrong way (without concern over consent or anesthesia) and in the wrong setting (created by the evil “laws” of a diabolical dictator.)[1]

At the end of his article, Kevorkian offers a bioethical “Code of Conduct” for “any professional or lay individual in any way participating in experimentation on human beings facing undeniably imminent and inevitable death.”

C.(1). Experiments may be of any kind or complexity. . . . C.(2). While a prospective subject is fully conscious, an experimenter may start any procedure which on thorough analysis portends no significant distress for the subject. . . . C.(3). Induction and irreversible maintenance of at least stage III general anesthesia is imperative before experimentation is begun on the following prospective subjects: (a) All brain-dead, comatose, mentally incompetent, or otherwise completely uncommunicative individuals. (b) All neonates, infants, and children less than (-) years old (age must be arbitrarily set by consensus). (c) All living intrauterine and aborted or delivered fetuses. C.(4). If the subject’s body is alive at the end of experimentation, final biologic death may be induced by means of: (a) Removal of organs for transplantation. (b) A lethal dose of a new or untested drug. . . . (c) A lethal intravenous bolus of thiopental solution. . . .[2]

Kevorkian’s research into human experimentation began while he was in the residency program at the University of Michigan, and eventually led to his removal from the program.

“While I was in my residency I was researching the idea of condemned men being allowed to submit to anesthesia rather than execution. While under anesthesia we could do experiments from which they wouldn’t recover, and then remove their organs. Now if you needed a liver or a heart, would you like to see a young healthy man or woman fried in the electric chair? No! But that Dark Age school told me I would have to drop the project I was working on or leave. So I left, and spent my last two years of residency at Pontiac.” While an associate pathologist at Pontiac General Hospital Kevorkian ran into more trouble. As part of an experiment he transfused cadaver blood directly into several patients. Kevorkian’s actions shocked the U.S. medical community, but no legal action was taken against him.

“All it involved was taking blood out of dead people who died suddenly and then transfusing it into living people just like regular blood. The Russians had been doing it for over half a century, but instead of transfusing it directly into a person, they would s

Re:In b4 losers asking why he didn't kill himself

[canadian_right]

Worrying that legal euthanasia may lead to trouble with insurance companies is only a problem in the very few, terribly uncivilized, western countries that do not have universal medical care paid for by taxes. Everywhere else the issues are to make sure the correct controls are in place so that only the truly terminal, that truly desire to die, and are competent to make that decision are euthanasized.

Oregon has a very reasonable law controlling euthanasia in that state, and to the best of my knowledge it has not caused any medical insurance to be denied.

Re:In b4 losers asking why he didn't kill himself

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

States will definitely make sure young people believe reasonable measures are taken to verify that desire to die. And the incentive of the state is to ignore the desire part as much as possible.

So a thorny question is : how will this evolve over time ? Since the obvious way to "improve" the money and power of the state is to find ways to kill anyone who isn't working in the private sector.

Re:In b4 losers asking why he didn't kill himself

[Anonymous Coward]

A TL/DR summary of the above:

1) He suggests that when a patient is going to die, and nothing can be done to prevent it, then it makes sense to perform medical experiments on that patient, assuming that consent can first be obtained, and that the experimentation can be done without causing any additional hardship to that patient.

2) He suggests that the above could also apply to convicts about to be executed, again with consent and without introducing additional suffering.

3) He suggested that blood could be transfused from someone recently deceased directly into the body of someone in need of a transfusion. The practical application of this procedure would be on the battlefield.

4) He suggests that the idea of experimenting on consenting humans would be preferable to experimenting on non-consenting animals.

All of the above sounds pretty reasonable to me.

The questionable parts are at the end, where he expands on the concept of "planned death" to include some externally imposed deaths, and also suggests a market for human organs. Not much detail is provided for either, so I'll make no comment here.

Re:In b4 losers asking why he didn't kill himself

[durrr]

The unreasonable part is that some moron can block my consent to such experiments. When did we redefine freedom as "what lawmakers decide".

Re:In b4 losers asking why he didn't kill himself

[The Dawn Of Time]

The unpalatable truth is that killing old people off would be good for everybody, aside of course from the specific old people killed. There would be less expenditure needlessly prolonging useless life, and fewer people who ferociously hold outmoded opinions to the detriment of all.

Re:In b4 losers asking why he didn't kill himself

[hairyfeet]

Well as someone who lost his sister in 07 to a long and horribly drawn out illness, watching as she slowly but surely fell apart with nothing the doctors could do to even stop the pain (she had a rare degenerating nerve disorder) I appreciate the work that Mr Kevorkian did and the price he paid to bring the rights of the suffering to the national spotlight.

Despite our advances in medicine the are plenty of times where all medical interventions are useless and the pain simply can NOT be in any way controlled. While my sister wouldn't have taken the option no matter how much she suffered (she wanted to live long enough to see her oldest start college, she unfortunately died 6 months before he began) the simple fact is as intelligent creatures it should be our right to choose whether we wish to endure the suffering or not.

The way I've always looked at it is this: if you would put an animal down rather than making it endure that kind of hellish suffering, then why in God's name would you make a human being go through that? By the end my sis's lungs were failing, she could no longer speak more than a word or two, couldn't eat or drink because her ability to swallow was failing, her nerves were lit up like pins and needles, and just the act of turning her could easily break bones. Why would anyone force someone to live through that? They should have the choice as intelligent beings to decide if that is how they want to be or not. To have it any other way is simple cruelty.

Re:In b4 losers asking why he didn't kill himself

[cold fjord]

The unreasonable part is that some moron can block my consent to such experiments. When did we redefine freedom as "what lawmakers decide".

I think there is overlap with the ethics of selling human organs:

Organ sales: Compromising ethics

What proponents of the selling of organs for transplant call a 'choice,' I call the right to be cruelly exploited. Democratic societies have always limited our ability to harm ourselves, hence, workplace safety, child labor, or minimum wage laws that forbid a 5-year-old to 'choose' to take a dangerous, low-paying job. (Even when someone faces dire poverty, we do not permit him to sell himself into slavery.) Similarly, the laws barring organ sales are intended to protect those who, out of economic desperation, would be harmed by those with more money.

What's more, it is a highly dubious proposition that selling an organ offers even the very poor meaningful recourse. A few years after taking such a perilous step, the seller is apt to find himself in unchanged economic circumstances, albeit with one fewer kidney and the attendant health risks. There are better ways to respond to the problems of poverty than by expanding the opportunity for the rich to harvest the organs of the poor. And there are better ways to reduce the waiting list for kidney transplants: I particularly admired FL Delmonico's noting what preventive medicine can achieve.

It is true that we need to expand the pool of organs available for transplant, but there are ways to do that without endangering the most vulnerable members of society. One plan would make the use of cadaveric organs routine, switching from the current opt-in system to allowing those folks with, for example, religious objections, to opt out. It is curious that those who resist such an approach show more concern for the sentiments of the dead than the health of the living.

The Hidden Cost of Organ Sale

I assume you see nothing wrong with this, nobody in need of help? Three men charged in 'dungeon' castration

Laws establish limits, its been that way since before recorded history.

Re:In b4 losers asking why he didn't kill himself

[hey!]

The picture emerges is of a person who often had an important point to raise, but was more than a little creepy.

His antics as a resident aren't disturbing because they involve a dead body; they're disturbing because they involved a *live patient*. What is more, he seems utterly incapable of questioning the wisdom and ethics of doing something to a patient just to satisfy his curiosity. In fact he seems a little self-righteous about the whole affair, as if they *only* basis to objecting to the procedure is moral cowardice. As Aristotle would point out, the opposite of cowardice is rashness, not bravery; bravery is the reasonable mid-point between the vicious extremes.

So it wasn't Dr. Kevorkian's suicide machine that was scary, it was the man himself. He married a narrow-minded moral narcissism to a fascination with using human beings as experimental animals. I sometimes wonder whether he built the machine just because he was curious to see it in operation. As a pathologist he didn't deal with patients at all -- just tissues. An oncologist might be driven to build the machine because he saw the suffering of his patients; for Dr. Kevorkian the motivation came from someplace else, at best some place more abstract, at worst ... who knows? It has no bearing on the validity of his views about euthanasia or human experimentation. Those ideas should stand or fall on their own merits.

Nonetheless he was a fascinating and somewhat disturbing character. Maybe it takes a character like that to see the medical ethics emperor has no clothes, but I'm more comfortable with somebody who occasionally sees two sides to a complex issue.

Re:In b4 losers asking why he didn't kill himself

[rastilin]

The reason people fought against euthensia was the fear that it might be abused. People would pressure other people into it "for the good of the family" or that elderly would feel pressured to do it themselves so they wouldn't burden their relatives. When the BBC Documentary on the subject came out, this was precisely the vibe I got from them. There's no way that this won't be abused to get rid of people who are considered a "burden".

Re:In b4 losers asking why he didn't kill himself

[UnderCoverPenguin]

for the state it is beneficial to kill people the moment they turn unproductive, which tends to be 10-20 years before these people become truly infirm. In the case of chronic unemployment, it can even be 50 years or more before one becomes infirm

By what definition of unproductive? Retired people are often able to mentor children and young adults Sadly, our society tends to ignore the great many of these potential mentors. Should they be penalized for simply being ignored? Then add in the increasing occurrence of forced retirement for no reason other than a perception they are too old. (Some of my best coworkers are from 70 to 90+ years and are still very productive.)

Before we consider euthanizing the elderly, we should first stop discarding otherwise productive people - whether they work in a business/school/etc or help their younger family members.

Re:In b4 losers asking why he didn't kill himself

[cold fjord]

Worrying that legal euthanasia may lead to trouble with insurance companies is only a problem in the very few, terribly uncivilized, western countries that do not have universal medical care paid for by taxes.

Yes, we keep hearing reports of how those government run plans turn out.

British healthcare in crisis despite massive investment
Cruel and neglectful' care of one million NHS patients exposed
Hospitals must make deep cuts to survive

For $41-billion, Canadians deserve a straight answer

The Ugly Truth About Canadian Health Care

My health-care prejudices crumbled not in the classroom but on the way to one. On a subzero Winnipeg morning in 1997, I cut across the hospital emergency room to shave a few minutes off my frigid commute. Swinging open the door, I stepped into a nightmare: the ER overflowed with elderly people on stretchers, waiting for admission. Some, it turned out, had waited five days. The air stank with sweat and urine. Right then, I began to reconsider everything that I thought I knew about Canadian health care. I soon discovered that the problems went well beyond overcrowded ERs. Patients had to wait for practically any diagnostic test or procedure, such as the man with persistent pain from a hernia operation whom we referred to a pain clinic—with a three-year wait list; or the woman needing a sleep study to diagnose what seemed like sleep apnea, who faced a two-year delay; or the woman with breast cancer who needed to wait four months for radiation therapy, when the standard of care was four weeks. . . .

Nor were the problems I identified unique to Canada—they characterized all government-run health-care systems. Consider the recent British controversy over a cancer patient who tried to get an appointment with a specialist, only to have it canceled—48 times. More than 1 million Britons must wait for some type of care, with 200,000 in line for longer than six months. A while back, I toured a public hospital in Washington, D.C., with Tim Evans, a senior fellow at the Centre for the New Europe. The hospital was dark and dingy, but Evans observed that it was cleaner than anything in his native England. In France, the supply of doctors is so limited that during an August 2003 heat wave—when many doctors were on vacation and hospitals were stretched beyond capacity—15,000 elderly citizens died. Across Europe, state-of-the-art drugs aren’t available. And so on. ...

In The Business of Health, Robert Ohsfeldt and John Schneider factor out intentional and unintentional injuries from life-expectancy statistics and find that Americans who don’t die in car crashes or homicides outlive people in any other Western country.

And if we measure a health-care system by how well it serves its sick citizens, American medicine excels. Five-year cancer survival rates bear this out. For leukemia, the American survival rate is almost 50 percent; the European rate is just 35 percent. Esophageal carcinoma: 12 percent in the United States, 6 percent in Europe. The survival rate for prostate cancer is 81.2 percent here, yet 61.7 percent in France and down to 44.3 percent in England—a striking variation.

Also note that the United States actually has tax payer funded medical care, Medicare, for example. Medicare refuses more treatment than private insurers:

Re:In b4 losers asking why he didn't kill himself

[durrr]

What if we consider the other end of the spectrum? A licensed MD doing x or y on a whealty and socially well adjusted adult person with full and informed consent and no benefits outside research?
Obviously we only find blackmarket organ trade and charlatans running dungeons today when the legal restrictions choke out all opportunity for decent and formal alternatives. Same goes for drugs, you won't find ecologic and locally produced opium sold at competitive prices and lab verified for strength, smokeable in a comfortable enviroment with properly trained medical personell nearby, because any such establishment would be raided and closed twenty minutes after opening.

Re:In b4 losers asking why he didn't kill himself

[hairyfeet]

That is why one should have reviews NOT force everyone on the planet who is horribly broken to suffer for years, sometimes decades, in agony! I mean everything CAN be abused, look at the politicians that wanted to ban pain patches and oxycotin because kids were stealing them to get high even though they are some of the few drugs that help with bone pain.

I personally have a simple little rule that I think should be applied: Would you make your dog go through that? If whatever it is is nasty enough you would show pity on an animal in that condition and put them down then by God people should be given the same consideration you would show the damned dog!

I think everyone that thinks it is wrong should be forced to spend a week, just a single week, in the company of someone who has an aggressive untreatable illness like my sister. They should get to hear the sound of the bones snapping as one of the nerves in her legs fire and cause a violent jerk that shatters the bones, listen as each breath is a struggle that causes great pain, see the kind of agony these people go through.

Too damned many in this country thinks modern medicine if it can't help will at least be able to deal with the pain, but that is total horseshit. When you get into nerve damage and cancers you can give up doing anything for the pain, all the drugs in the world simply wouldn't be able to stop it. I am only grateful that in the end we had a doc that was decent enough to "snow" her, which is a nice way of saying give her a fatal dose of painkillers, because otherwise she would have slowly suffocated to death. It would have been like someone sitting on her chest and slowly pushing down, a slow and horrifying ending.

Frankly NO family should have to go through that and I seriously doubt there would be very many that would want to snow grandma just because they don't want to deal. in reality they would find as I am finding out with my mom, that in the end there is only so much a family is physically capable of doing for someone who is in pain and whose mind is going, and thanks to local and state laws that say as long as she has the ability to say "no" she can't be put in a home. In the end most likely I'll have to abandon her and hope that when she falls she hurts herself but not fatally so that the police will intervene because I've been told until she is a danger to herself there is nothing anyone can do.

Can you even IMAGINE having to make a decision like that about your own mother? That you have to hope she hurts but doesn't kill herself simply because you can't stay awake 24/7/365 to deal with a woman that is frequently becoming combative and paranoid? To hear the woman that raised you curse the day you were born because you won't let her eat nothing but candy like some sort of junkie? Until you have lived through something like this one simply cannot judge or understand, and I appreciate what old Jack did to bring folks like my mom and sis to light.

As K.V. said

[gratuitous_arp]

God bless you, Dr. Kevorkian

Re:News For Nerds

[jpapon]

Just because you're a nerd doesn't mean you shouldn't care about the goings-on of the world. These days, nerds are involved in the core debates over where our liberties lie, be that in matters of free expression, free beer, free speech, free thought, or the freedom to die.

There is no right more personal

[drinkypoo]

There is no right more personal than to choose the hour of one's death. Fate robs us of it on one end and government attempts to rob us of it on the other. Fate is what it is, but government wants to control when you die because otherwise it messes up the spreadsheets.

Re:There is no right more personal

[uglyduckling]

Objections to assisted suicide aren't only about the act, they're about the process. In other words, many people (including myself) believe that it is impossible to make assisted suicide available without compromising the protection of those who do not wish to commit suicide, but might be directly or indirectly pressured to do so. This includes internal pressure (e.g. mental illness). I do actually disagree with assisted suicide on principle, but even if I were to accept that ideally people should have a right to choose when they die, I would oppose its legalisation on the basis that the protection of the vulnerable (i.e. those who wouldn't wish to die early but by failure of the process end up doing so) trumps the desire of those who with a clear mind and without coercion do wish to die early. Can I also correct you on one point - there is a world of difference between deliberately causing death, and allowing death by not treating - the right to refuse treatment is enshrined in international and national law, so sustaining life "by any means" cannot (or at least should not) be imposed on anybody.

Re:There is no right more personal

[MRe_nl]

"in the Netherlands where they've dismantled the bulk of their palliative care system" BULLSHIT Alert

"old people are afraid to go to the doctor" BULLSHIT Alert

"carry cards saying "Please don't euthanize me" BULLSHIT Alert

"their socialized medicine" BULLSHIT Alert

Re:There is no right more personal

[Canazza]

Exactly, there's a difference (Slight but crucial) between Assisted Suicide and a DNR Order. Personally, I think both should be taken on a case-by-case basis, Even a crippled, paralysed, motor neuron disease riddled man can still contribute immensly to the sum of human knowledge. Okay, not everyone who's permenantly paralysed is Stephen Hawking but you are still you and if you can communicate you want an Assisted Suicide you can still make a difference. Even if it's only to your family, or to one single person and make their life better. Once you're gone your memories and experience go with you and they won't help anyone then.

If you're medicated to the eyeballs and your only moments of lucidity are acompanied by unbareable pain then I understand AS in that situation, but the problem with legistlating it and legalising it means that people other than the desperate and rightfully needy might slip through, and someone who shouldn't have been assisted will have been assisted and nothing will bring that person back.

Re:There is no right more personal

[Anonymous Coward]

while his response was a little crude i have to agree with MRe_nl. It is not nearly as bad as you make out to be. The link to google shows only hits taken from a daily telegraph paper which quotes statements of a British researcher of a pressure group opposed to euthanasia and of course the unbiased religious groups ( I know we are the Sodom and Gomorrah). While it is true that around 6,000 people carry anti-euthanasia cards this is a minor group, such as the group which stipulated they do want to be euthanised in certain cases. Elderly people are not afraid to go to the doctor. That is just the sensation-seeking statement of Mr Fitzpatrick of pressure group Not Dead Yet, who isn't cited as having done actual research in any of the articles.

As to palliative care being dismantled, You are right. But that is not because doctors go around killing patients by the hundreds, it is because every aspect of health-care is being dismantled. Something about the retreat of the welfare state, financial crisis, growing market incentives in health-care etc...

Re:There is no right more personal

[cold fjord]

I think you need recalibration.

Inquiry launched as Dutch euthanasia cases surge by 13% in ONE year

Anti-euthanasia groups say, however, that the sharp increase is probably linked to the collapse of the palliative care system in the Netherlands. Euthanasia is usually carried out by administering a strong sedative to put the patient in a coma, followed by a drug to stop breathing and cause death. . . .
Many Dutch people are growing uneasy about the way in which the law has been applied.
Among them is Dr Els Borst, the former health minister and deputy prime minister who guided the law through the Dutch parliament.
Last December said she regretted that euthanasia was effectively destroying palliative care. Amsterdam, a city with a population of 1.2 million people, is now served by two tiny hospices.
The British campaign group Dignity in Dying - formerly the Voluntary Euthanasia Society - has acknowledged that euthanasia is open to abuse but insists that assisted suicide could still work in practice.

Continent Death - Euthanasia in Europe

Euthanasia has also entered the pediatric wards, where eugenic infanticide has become common even though babies cannot ask to be killed. According to a 1997 study published in the British medical journal The Lancet, approximately 8 percent of all Dutch infant deaths result from lethal injections. The babies deemed killable are often disabled and thus are thought not to have a "livable life." The practice has become so common that 45 percent of neonatologists and 31 percent of pediatricians who responded to Lancet surveys had killed babies.

It gets worse: Repeated studies sponsored by the Dutch government have found that doctors kill approximately 1,000 patients each year who have not asked for euthanasia. This is not only a violation of every guideline, but an act that Dutch law considers murder. Nonvoluntary euthanasia has become so common that it even has a name: "Termination without request or consent."

Despite this carnage, Dutch doctors are very rarely prosecuted for such crimes, and the few that are brought to court are usually exonerated. Moreover, even if a doctor is found guilty, he or she is almost never punished in any meaningful way, nor does the murderer face discipline by the Dutch Medical Society. For example, in 2001, a doctor was convicted of murdering an 84-year-old patient who had not asked to be killed. Prosecutors demanded a nine-month suspended probation (!), yet even this brush — it can’t even be called a slap — on the wrist was rejected by the trial judge who refused to impose any punishment. Not to worry. The appellate court decided to get tough: It imposed a one-week suspended sentence on the doctor for murder.

Even such praising with faint damnation isn’t enough for the Dutch Medical Association. As a result of this and the handful of other non-punished murder convictions of doctors who engaged in termination without request or consent, the organization is lobbying to legalize non-voluntary euthanasia. Along these same lines — and demonstrating that the culture of death recognizes no limits — the day after the Dutch formally legalized euthanasia, the country’s minister of health advocated the provision of suicide pills to the elderly who do not qualify for killing under Dutch law.

Lest we think the Dutch experience is a fluke, let us now turn our attention to Belgium. Only one year ago the Belgians legalized Dutch-style euthanasia under "strict" guidelines. As with the Netherlands, once unfettered, the euthanasia culture quickly began to swallow Belgium whole. Moreover, the slide down the slope has occurred at a greatly accelerated pace. It took decades for the Dutch euthanasia to reach the current mo

Re:There is no right more personal

[canadian_right]

Oregon has legal euthanasia. To the best of my knowledge the main controls are:

• Must have a terminal illness, less than a handful of months to live
• Must be of sound mind
• Must be in intolerable pain
• Must have three doctors signatures saying you meet all the requirements

So this prevents many of the abuses you brought up. I agree that you must guard against abuse, but I think that people should have the choice to end their lives when they stop being worth living, and there is nothing that can be done to fix it. I would not agree with helping someone who is depressed to commit suicide, for example, but would support it for someone with terminal cancer who is in great pain.

Re:There is no right more personal

[Idarubicin]

...there is a world of difference between deliberately causing death, and allowing death by not treating...

Oh, legally, sure. Practically, however, it's a matter of dumb chance. Someone who wishes to die (and makes that as a clear, deliberated, rational, cool-headed choice) has to wait to 'luck in' to an incidental ailment that can be neglected to the point of lethality. The terminal cancer patient with pneumonia gets to choose whether or not to commit suicide by refusal of IV antibiotic treatment. An otherwise identical patient with terminal cancer but no pneumonia doesn't get that choice.

If you accept that there is the potential for abuse by coercing individuals into legal assisted suicide (were such an option available), you also have to accept that there is the potential for abuse involving coercion of individuals into accepting (potentially) therapeutic interventions that they don't actually want. For physicians, there is much more incentive to enroll terminally-ill patients in advanced clinical trials than there is to coerce them into suicide.

Re:There is no right more personal

[St.Creed]

First, your facts.

- You claim 4000 patients a year are euthanized. That's not true: the peak year was in 2009, with 2500 cases. It rises by about 200 a year, mostly in line with the rise of the age in the population as a whole. This is still WAY down from 1995 when the number was around 3600. Better palliative care and pain treatments have reduced the need for euthanasia.

- Every year more than 10000 people request euthanasia. Two thirds of those applications are denied outright. The others are granted but not everyone then uses the opportunity. Some people die before they get euthanasia, others reconsider.

- A large part of what you quote is outright untrue. It is a clear warning sign that most of the articles you link don't provide citations.

- The article in the Weekly Standard is written by a fellow of the Discovery Institute, best known for its promotion of "Intelligent Design" creationism.

All in all, your view is biased, based on hyperbole, and is in need of re-evaluation.

euthanasia vs the death penalty

[MrKaos]

The cruel irony about this debate is that people who want to (or need to) die are sentenced to an indeterminate amount of suffering before they actually die and people convicted to death have their lives taken for a crime they should spend the rest of their natural lives contemplating in a steel and concrete cell.

The way the most despised are treated says a lot about a society, but the way a society treats it's least despised says a lot more.

Re:euthanasia vs the death penalty

[uglyduckling]

What's sad (but I don't think ironic) is that so many people frame this debate as a choice between suffering and death. The choice should be between suffering and not suffering. In other words, if so many people are suffering to such an extent, rather than debating assisted death, we should be finding out why the care needs of a large number of people are not being met, and make the changes to health and social care that are needed. Only when we have done everything to ensure suffering-free life, should we even begin to discuss death as an alternative.

Re:euthanasia vs the death penalty

[canadian_right]

No, it is true. In the final stages of cancer the pain is so overwhelming that if you are conscious you are in pain, not matter what drugs are given to you. Horrible, life destroying pain with no end.You would have to administer a general anaesthesia to stop the pain, but then the person isn't living any ways.

I sincerely hope you never learn the truth of this first hand, or due to a family member suffering so.

Administering enough analgesics to kill the patient is euthanasia.

Re:euthanasia vs the death penalty

[baKanale]

It also seems like there is a decent sized overlap between those who support capital punishment and those who condemn euthanasia. I've frequently heard the claim from that crowd that voluntary euthanasia leads down a "slippery slope" to involuntary euthanasia and a "culture of death". If that's the case, then what does letting the government execute people lead to?

Re:It sure is news for nerds here

[aztrailerpunk]

I appreciate the other news on slashdot. It's one of the last few places I can go to read comments that are not clearly based on a political agenda. I can read a discussion from an educated audience that is generally willing to converse intelligently and not just flame people that are the outliers on a school of thought.

Re:It sure is news for nerds here

[Gaygirlie]

stuff that matters

Atleast the quoted part is indeed true in this case.

Re:News For Nerds

[errandum]

Because the title wasn't clear enough for you not to click it.

Don't like this kind of news, don't read them :).

Please Read a Book...

[ideonexus]

"God Bless You Doctor Kevorkian" is a reference to Kurt Vonnegut's book of the same title. In that book Vonnegut, an atheist, explains how at a meeting of the American Humanist Society, after Isaac Asimov's death, he started a speech there with "Isaac Asimov is in heaven now, God rest is soul." which got a huge laugh from the assembly of atheists.

So it's not an actual religious statement, but a semi-farcical one, acknowledging that we atheists do seem to be at a loss for words when it comes to comforting and consoling people over the recently departed. I try to focus on what a miracle it was that we get to experience the wonder of existence at all--statistically speaking. But I was at a complete loss for words when my friend's wife accidentally backed over their son playing in the driveway. What can an spiritual naturalist say to someone when confronted with that? Religion has it easy, they just say the child is in a better place. I don't know what we have... and until we have something, religion wins.

Kevorkian led a long life in service of a greater good. What do you propose we as empiricists, spiritual naturalists, rationalists (call us anything other than the unscientific word "atheist" that defines us in a religious context) say to honor the dead and comfort the living? I'm genuinely curious.

Re:Please Read a Book...

[Anonymous Coward]

"I'm sorry for your loss, as a rationalist I can say, without a doubt, he is no longer suffering."

Re:Please Read a Book...

[vadim_t]

Kevorkian led a long life in service of a greater good. What do you propose we as empiricists, spiritual naturalists, rationalists (call us anything other than the unscientific word "atheist" that defines us in a religious context) say to honor the dead and comfort the living? I'm genuinely curious.

IMO, if you have something on hand for that situation, your words are empty. Things like "god bless" and "he's in a better place" are just like "gesundheit" for sneezing. Things that are automatically said because you're supposed to. And since you're supposed to and not doing any thinking, they don't mean anything.

I'd have some trouble figuring out what to say in that situation as well. What I would do is trying to figure out how I can help, and that's going to depend on who I'm dealing with. I don't think there's a formula for it.

Re:Please Read a Book...

[houghi]

I don't know what we have... and until we have something, religion wins.

I utterly and completely disagree. A religious person might say that it was in Gods hands or the person now is in Gods hands.

That does not take away the pain.

What we have is something all people have, regardless of religion. It is called compassion. The compassion is there for those who are left without a loved one.

What I say differs from how well I know the person, how well he knows me and the relation to the person who died as well as other things.

A good friend of mine lost his mom and I said "Well, shit happens." He later thanked me for not being one of those idiots who told him they were sorry and how they would be there for him. And I won;t repeat what he said about the religious people who told him she was with God now.

Do not misunderstand me, I do not say that to all people. I have said nothing and just gave a hug or even said "My condolences" and nothing more.

What is more important is not so much what you say, but that you mean it and that they understand they can lean on you when THEY need to.

That means that there is no one answer. Each person is different and what works for me won't work for you and the other way around. The advantage you as an atheist has is that you can say what YOU feel, not repeat what somebody else said.

That in itself will mean a LOT more to the person you talk to. And not only during sad moments, also during happy moments, like births or weddings.

Re:Please Read a Book...

[rolfwind]

What can an spiritual naturalist say to someone when confronted with that?

You're making the mistake that specific words actually matter. Consolation is consolation.

And empty phrases are just that. Don't put to much stock into packaged "wisdom". If my loved one died, people yapping pointless shit to me would have little value. I know from my childhood. It's more them trying to make themselves feel better in an awkward situation than it is actually about consoling somebody.

I don't know what we have... and until we have something, religion wins.

What a load.

Re:Please Read a Book...

[InfiniteZero]

Great question.

Nerds tend to be idealists, and hold the ideal of logic and rationalism as the absolute and the supreme. I used to be the same way. This approach works perfectly in math science and engineering, but often fails miserably in social settings, because it does not consider what I call the "people factor", or the human condition.

In situations like that, it's not about logic -- it's not even about you. It's about emotion -- OTHER people's emotion. As such, even though I'm an atheist (an agnostic with an inclination towards atheism), I now have no problem saying "God rests his soul", if it's of any condolence to the family and friends of the deceased. I'm saying it from THEIR perspective, in the sense that, assuming there is a god, and a soul as THEY believe, then by all means, may God rests his soul.

Maybe days or weeks later, but it's not the place and time to discuss religion right there and then.

On a related note, a wiseman once told me, "It's not about what you say, but what people hear."

Re:News For Nerds

[Rob the Bold]

What does death have to do with "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters"?

I have some potentially alarming news for you . . .

Re:It sure is news for nerds here

[RsG]

can go to read comments that are not clearly based on a political agenda

(Emphasis mine).

I read that sentence to mean it's possible to find non-political discourse on slashdot, not that all discussions are non-political. Granted, there are still idiots who insist on dragging their own soapboxes into every single discussion regardless of relevance, but they haven't taken over yet.

Plus, if there were a group mentality you describe, there wouldn't be flame wars between rival ideologies on those very subjects you bring up. Whereas there are many such flame wars. You unwittingly draw attention to this fact by referring to the contradiction in a group mentality that dislikes both corporations and government; some posters are anti-government, some are anti-corporate and some are both or neither (not a group consensus in other words).

Re:It sure is news for nerds here

[Khashishi]

I read Slashdot for politics. If you don't like it, why don't you hide the politics articles in your options. Frankly, I think geeks are generally more rational than the common folk, and I value their opinions.

Re:He was a murderer

[Khashishi]

He was a gun maker. He never pulled the trigger.

human rights

[Khashishi]

To me, the debate on suicide is not about suffering, but about human rights. If we do not own our own physical bodies, what do we own at all? There is nothing more unequivocally yours than you. For a state to take control of your own body away from you is capital theft, akin to slavery.

Re:It sure is news for nerds here

[Ironchew]

Ahh, the eternal "is this really news for nerds?" troll.
This is a philosophical debate in society; nerds are welcome. What you seem to want is "news for consumers".