Jack Kevorkian, who painted the delightful picture above, helped kill people—other than Thomas Youk, who he lethally injected—via an assisted suicide machine in which the client flipped a switch opening the valve of a canister containing carbon monoxide. Yet, he has come out against the alleged approach to assisted suicide taken by the arrested Final Exit Network assisted suicide practitioners. From the story:
Southfield attorney Mayer Morganroth said Kevorkian, once referred to as Dr. Death, believes a doctor should always be involved in any type of assisted suicide.FEN activists didn’t use carbon monoxide: They allegedly used helium. I can see why Kevorkian would object!
“Other than that, he’s not allowed to express any views about the methods they use,” Morganroth said Thursday. “That’s a limitation on his parole. The only thing he can say is that he disagrees with the methods and one of the reasons is that there should be a doctor present.”
As to having a doctor present for assisted suicide, he wasn’t one for most of his assisted suicides since he had lost his license to practice. Moreover, he was a pathologist and had not treated living patients since his medical training in the 1950s. Moreover one more time, Switzerland doesn’t require a doctor’s presence, and doctors in the Netherlands now give a book to patients who don’t qualify for euthanasia on how to commit “auto euthanasia,” which is their euphemism for suicide.
Finally, FEN activists may be fanatics, but unlike Kevorkian, they never advocated conducting human experiments on the people they were helping to kill.
