Dr. Death is still up to his grisly business. Jack Kevorkian has now been instrumental in the death of more than fifty patients. It seems like he is dropping another body off at the morgue every several weeks or so.
What Kevorkian did two weeks ago was especially repugnant. First he videotaped himself killing a man by lethal injection. Then he mailed the tape to CBS, where it aired on 60 Minutes.
When I heard what CBS was going to do, I said, “But that’s a snuff film!” In other words, it is a movie which ends with an actual murder, filmed primarily for the vicious pleasure of watching someone die. Two weeks ago, while some of us were worshiping God, a nationwide television audience was witnessing a homicide.
Dr. Death is now awaiting trial for first-degree murder in Michigan. By releasing the videotape from one of his killings, he has provided the evidence for his own prosecution. Whether he will actually be convicted or not is doubtful. This is his sixth trial. Three times he was acquitted, once the charges were dropped, and the last was declared a mistrial.
If he is convicted, Kevorkian has vowed to go on a hunger strike in prison and become a martyr for the cause of euthanasia. It sounds like the man has a death wish, which is not surprising. Those who destroy others ultimately destroy themselves.
We have a opened a window on the world of euthanasia before. First, we have observed that physician-assisted suicide is bad medicine. For more than 2,000 years, doctors have sworn, “I will give no deadly medicine to anyone if asked.” This phrase from the Hippocratic Oath is part of what has made medicine an honorable profession. For physicians to retain that honor, they must not be in charge of killing, only of healing.
To see what happens in a society where doctors kill as well as heal, one might go to the Netherlands, where assisted suicide has been legalized [see Herbert Hendin, Seduced by Death: Doctors, Patients, and the Dutch Cure, W. W. Norton, 1996]. A majority of Dutch doctors now support this practice, not only for terminal illness, but also as a course of treatment for depression [Associated Press, 6/19/97]. Unless you’re happy, apparently, you’re better off dead.
Not surprisingly, assisted suicide now accounts for as many as 10,000 Dutch deaths each year. In 20% of these cases, doctors ended a life without the patient’s consent. The most chilling example may be the doctor who explained why he killed a patient with breast cancer. “It could have taken another week before she died,” he said. “I just needed this bed” [Herbert Hendin, et al., “Physician-Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia in the Netherlands,” JAMA, 6/4/97, Vol. 277, No. 21, 1720-22].
Voluntary euthanasia inevitably becomes involuntary euthanasia. Soon death will stalk the hallways of our own hospitals and nursing homes. Indeed, it already does. Dr. Death has many nameless, faceless accomplices. One fifth of critical-care nurses in America admit that they have helped a patient die [U Penn survey cited in The Philadelphia Inquirer, 5/23/96, A1]. That is bad medicine.
Second, physician-assisted suicide is bad ethics. A doctor who helps a patient kill himself really is helping to commit a murder. Suicide is the murder of the self. Although it is not an unforgivable sin, it is a cosmic sin. It is an attempt to destroy the whole world as it relates to me. Since suicide is a murderous sin, helping someone else to commit it is also a sin.
Third, we have observed that physician-assisted suicide is bad theology. It assumes that human beings have a right to control their own destiny. As Kevorkian puts it, “It’s your life, it’s your death; it should be your choice.” But it is not your life after all. If we live, we live to the Lord; and if we die, we die to the Lord. So, whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord (Rom. 14:8). Your death, as well as your life, is given to you by God to be used for his glory.
Physician-assisted suicide assumes that human suffering is the ultimate evil. Suffering is evil, of course. It is the result of God’s curse against sin. Yet suffering is not to be avoided at all costs. It, too, has a place in God’s redemptive plan.
Contrary to popular belief, physical pain is not the main reason patients request aid in dying. A recent study from the Harvard Medical School showed that they mainly suffer from depression, hopelessness, and anxiety [the study, by Ezekiel J. Emanuel, was published in Lancet and cited in The Wall Street Journal, 1/7/97]. In other words, people want help committing suicide for spiritual reasons, not medical reasons.
We have said much of that before. But there are two things about recent events that are new. One is that this time Dr. Kevorkian administered the lethal injection of potassium chloride himself. He did not just help someone kill himself, he actually killed him.
The other thing that is new is that hardly anyone seems to care. Dr. Kevorkian is old news. If he wants to get attention any more, he has to take to the airwaves. Perhaps it was inevitable that in the age of television, Dr. Death would become a TV star. Perhaps it was inevitable, too, that his show would air during “sweeps week.”
It is true that some viewers were outraged. A number of CBS affiliates refused to air that particular episode of 60 Minutes. Some advertisers pulled their sponsorship off the program. But we have not heard the sustained outrage which Dr. Death (or CBS, for that matter) deserves. Can you imagine the uproar 60 Minutes would have caused a generation ago if it had tried to air a high-tech snuff film?
When there is casual death on TV, it is a sure sign that we live in a culture of death. That culture is making us drowsy. We are not quite asleep yet. A murder is able to rouse us from slumber, at least for a few moments. But some day soon, we will sleep and not wake. This is where the ultimate danger lies. Not just in the loss of life, but in the assisted suicide of the American soul.