Jack Kevorkian, M. D., who got out of jail today, is an enraging figure, not because of his belief that terminally ill people should have the right to choose when and how to die but as a result of his taking a deeply felt private issue into the realm of publicity, politics and posturing.
You can draw a straight line from his Dr. Death preening to the sorry spectacle of Congress debating the fate of Terri Schiavo. In both cases, outsiders were advancing their agendas by exploiting family misery that deserves privacy and respect.
Kevorkian with his impersonal “suicide machines” and lack of human connection with so-called patients was exploiting them as coldly as legislators were in debating the vegetative state of a woman Senator/Dr. Bill Frist diagnosed from videotape.
Dr. Death has agreed not to kill any more people, but he will undoubtedly continue to do grievous harm to human decency with his self-promoting piety.
A leading bioethics scholar, Arthur Caplan, sums it up: “The world of death and dying has, thankfully, passed him by. There is still more to talk about but not much useful that Jack Kevorkian can possibly say.”
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