It looks like Australia has their own version of Jack Kevorkian. Kevorkian, of course, earned the moniker “Dr. Death” for helping terminally ill people kill themselves. Kevorkian was sent to jail a few years ago for violating Michigan’s law against assisted suicide.
For someone like myself, who supports assisted suicide, Kevorkian was an unmitigated disaster. Not only did his presence make it easy for opponents to paint the assisted suicide movement as a bunch of kooks, but Kevorkian played fast and loose with the facts, helping some people to commit suicide where it was questionable whether the person was even terminally ill.
Last week, 77-year-old Australian Nancy Crick killed herself in front of friends and family. Crick said she suffered from terminal bowel cancer and her cause was taken up by Australian euthanasia advocate Dr. Philip Nitschke. Media accounts said Crick wanted to choose when she died rather than having her disease choose for her.
Now, though, it turns out that Crick did not have terminal cancer, and Nitschke knew this all along. News.Com.Au reports that medical specialists told Crick as late as a month before her suicide that she was free of bowel cancer.
Crick apparently also lied about her alleged weight loss and malnutrition. In an Internet diary, Crick claimed her weight had fallen to 27kg, but hospital records showed she weighed 38kg a month before she died, which was 2 kg more than she weighed in late 2001.
Nitschke’s response is that yes, well, “in retrospect we should have said that” Crick was not wasting away and did not have a terminal case of cancer. Nitschke believes this is irrelevant because Crick was apparently genuinely in severe, chronic pain.
Even if that is true, however, Nitschke just gave away almost all credibility his movement might have had. This is, after all, one of the most frequent criticisms of assisted suicide — that doctors, other medical professionals, and patients will inevitably twist or shade the truth. And Nitschke went ahead and proved them right.
Source:
Crick told she was clear Chris Griffith, Paula Doneman, and Hedley Thomas, News.Com.Au, May 29, 2002.
Australian suicide tests euthanasia law. Phil Mercer, The BBC, May 23, 2002.