Unfettered Letters

Dr. Kevorkian

Whether it is ethical or moral for a physician to end a person’s life is certainly a question for those who value medical ethics to debate. The same could be said about comparing the value of a person’s life to that of an animal’s life (6/26, Letters, “To end suffering”).

However, as a nurse, I strongly take issue with the actions of Jack Kevorkian primarily based on the millennia-old tenet of medical practice. He had no doctor-patient relationship with those he helped die.

In fact, as a pathologist, he never treated live persons. Rather, his expertise was tissue, cells and bacteria.

He did not know the full medical and psychosocial history of those who were not his patients in the truest meaning.

Therefore he is no more entitled to “treat” a person for his medical condition by euthanasia than a chemist with a Ph.D., also a doctor, would be just because he has knowledge regarding what dose of a chemical is fatal.

Clearly, Kevorkian’s actions in these cases do not stand the test for ethically sound or morally correct.

Laura Textor
Blue Springs

Votes on life issues

How do you know when an election is close? When articles and letters begin appearing The Star proclaiming how “pro-life” their particular party is.

The common theme is a belief that all pro-life issues are equal, when nothing could be further from the truth. The key word in pro-life is life, the opposite of which is death. When people support abortion or euthanasia, they cannot call themselves pro-life.

As a society, we are guilty of the worst genocide in history. Over 45 million have been killed by abortion, many times more than Hitler killed in the Holocaust.

All of the other pro-life issues are important but pale in comparison to the slaughter of the innocent children. That is why when I vote I first consider the candidate’s position on abortion, euthanasia, gay marriage, human cloning and embryonic stem-cell research (don’t be fooled by the Missouri amendment — it is human cloning in sheep’s clothing).

Bob Baskerville
Raymore

Assisted suicide?

May the law protect me from those who think like Dick McCoy (9/21, As I See It, “Families should be able to make right-to-die choices”). He proposes to put his “dear” wife to sleep, like an animal. Not content with the ethical advice he received from professionals, he took his plea for euthanasia public by rousing alarm against Sen. Sam Brownback’s proposed Assisted Suicide Prevention Act.

“Assisted suicide” implies that someone — perhaps a terminally ill person with unbearable pain — asks to die. A woman in her 19th year of Alzheimer’s is not asking to die.

Her husband asserts she is in a “nondescript vegetative state” despite the fact that she voluntarily accepts food. He ignores the suggestion that her inner life — though inscrutable — may be quite active.

The Star reported recently that electronic brain scan activity in a comatose patient was indistinguishable from that of a healthy person. Mrs. McCoy is not even unconscious! Should her fate depend on someone who claims “keeping her alive makes no sense spiritually”? Just where is the dividing line between matter and spirit?

McCoy evidently thinks his conscious but uncommunicative wife has crossed an arbitrary line from spiritual being to mere blob of living matter and therefore her diminished existence should be snuffed.

Diane Marshall
Independence

Assisted Suicide

Life and death decisions

Could someone please explain Sen. Sam Brownback’s statement on Wednesday’s Opinion page (8/23, “Pro-Con”)?

He wrote, “I doubt Americans want the government to decide when life is worth preserving and when life can be destroyed.” Is that not exactly what he is proposing with his Assisted Suicide Prevention Act?

With this act, Brownback would have the federal government decide that life is always worth preserving. What business is it of his what I might choose to do with my life? He wants to take that right out of the hands of the citizens (unfortunately, only Oregon currently allows this practice) and place it in the hands of the federal government.

What next? Will he want the government to decide when I should go to the doctor? What treatments I should take? When I should go to the bathroom? Enough already.

Don Kasparek
Olathe

Oh, how rich it is!

Perhaps Sam Brownback, in all his righteousness, throws a blind eye to his role in the Terri Schiavo fiasco. And his role, lest we forget, was strong-arming the republic, not to save a life but to tattoo his beliefs on every single American.

Now, Brownback has the chutzpah to claim that he “doubts Americans want the government to decide when life is worth preserving and when life can be destroyed.”

Oh, how rich it is! Rich like the backyard after the dog comes back inside.

Steve Dean
Blue Springs