Happy Birthday Jack Kevorkian

To clarify, Dr. Jack Kevorkian is still very much in favor of physician-assisted suicide and Oregon remains the only state in which it is legal.

News reports today, if read quickly, indicate that Kevorkian, who marks his 78th birthday today in a prison cell for helping a man die on television, does not favor the concept of controlling one’s own death any longer. This is not the case. He said only that he might have done things differently in his own cases.

There are many things to criticize about his methods, but without Kevorkian’s public persona and actions, the inexorable journey to nation-wide adoption of the Oregon model would probably not have come as quickly. He certainly does not deserve to rot and die in a prison cell.

In the future, Kevorkian will be known as a visionary, and the torture which he as been put through since his incarceration will be looked at as barbaric and unconscionable.

Having said that, when I was first discussing making a documentary out of Robert Schwartz’ death under Oregon’s Death With Dignity law, Robert and I discussed how the Kevorkian/Thomas Youk 60 Minutes story (which got him sent to jail) was a failure because: 1) Kevorkian was the story, not the dying man, and 2) there was no context for Youk’s death, other than the fact that he had Lou Gehrig’s Disease and wanted to die.

I promised Robert that the documentary would provide that context. Just before he died, Robert told his family and friends, at a service of Holy Communion on his back porch, how happy he was that they could be there and not be liable to criminal prosecution. He didn’t say, “as Kevorkian was,” but he might as well have.

Still, even though it was all legal, the facilitator took pains to make sure he did not hand Robert the glass of liquid Nembutal. Under the Oregon law, the patient must take the lethal dose on his own.

Happy Birthday, Dr. Kevorkian, from a resident of Oregon, who feels more secure and more in control of his own destiny because of your sacrifice. And I thank you for the men and women who have used the law, whether they took the medication or not.

This also appears on huffingtonpost.com