Response To Yet Another Kevorkian Fan

Yet another comment to share... I found the article You Definitely Don’t Know Jack while searching for material I could use in my Salon letter and liked it even though it wasn't quite meaty enough. However, I really didn't care much for one commenter's clueless parroting of Kevorkian's bullshit, so I responded in case someone else might be educated in the future. (I really need to add some kind of little horizontal rule or other mark to show where the beginning of my quoted comments are...hmm.)


Kevorkian only began commenting on terminal patients AFTER he realized that it was his most likely path to legalize live human experimentation, since he wasn't having luck pushing through experiments on prisoners. Tellingly, 75% of his "subjects" weren't terminal, and he picked his subjects for their publicity value rather than their circumstances.

It isn't advocating for a rational adult's freedom when a person talks about performing live experiments on infants with birth defects, people with treatable mental illnesses or cognitive disabilities, etc. If he truly was about mercy, then why has he openly stated that his hope is to experiment on & then kill them legally?

Also notable is that disabled (severe or non) people and those doing hospice care of the terminally ill -- the folks with the most firsthand experience -- are his biggest adversaries. We know better than anybody whether one can have a good life with various problems, what the real roadblocks to achieving one is, and when death actually makes sense (like when pain is beyond merely unbearable *and* there's absolutely no way to control it).

Instead, his supporters are non-disabled, non-terminal folk that assume that our lives are so bad that only rare "strong" types can "tolerate" it. Their reaction is more akin to a child terrified of the dark: rather than try to find out what's really there or listen when one of us tries to show them (then help us all fight to make sure it's not made artificially worse), they fight for the right to run away screaming.

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