Kevorkian and Assisted Suicide

Today during CLR I said that Jack Kevorkian was not a medical doctor. This was false (my philosophy professor lied to me!), so I'm sorry about that. However, what he did was still problematic for a number of reasons. He was not a long-time doctor of these patients, and many of the people he killed had treatable diseases. Some may even have been mentally ill.

I encourage you all to read up on this, because current laws force people who are terminally ill to live out excruciating pain until death. The question should not be whether a doctor should be allowed to actively kill or passively let a patient die but whether or not the patient is suffering. Unfortunately, when people in the U.S. think about euthanasia today, they usually think about Kevorkian, who actually was doing something insidious.

Here's some literature about the topic:

Active and Passive Euthanasia

Killing and Letting Die