Krauthammer on Kevorkian

I really must comment on the Column Right by Charles Krauthammer (Dec. 5). Many of us do not share Krauthammer’s opinion of Dr. Jack Kevorkian. This column is a shameful one. It drips with venom and shortsightedness.

I am a retired, robust, healthy, restless structural ironworker and transmission tower-line erector. In April I will be 76. I can face death today or tomorrow, with very little fear. What I am very fearful of is having to live my life in a wheelchair or worse yet, in bed hooked up to IVs and a respirator. That is my nightmare.

For some time I have wrestled with the idea of how I could take my life if I am disabled. Some few years ago I bought a rifle just for that purpose. Now if I had a stroke, I would not be able to load and discharge the gun. Who would help me? Not Krauthammer, I am sure--but maybe Dr. Kevorkian.

I would like to see a medal given to Dr. Kevorkian and a government grant to help him in his work.

WALTER SKIBA

Redondo Beach

* Krauthammer’s attack on Kevorkian is an entertaining piece of intellectual dishonesty.

He calls Kevorkian a “traveling executioner,” a “scary-looking guy,” and brings up the specter of Nazi experiments on concentration-camp victims. He reasons that if euthanasia were permitted, what would prevent “the young woman disappointed in love” or “the father ruined by bankruptcy” from requesting, and presumably receiving, Kevorkian’s services?

All this makes for lively reading, but Krauthammer is pretending not to know some central facts which he must know: The people who requested Kevorkian’s help were suffering terribly and unbearably. They had been that way for a long time. And there was no hope of getting better. It wasn’t a matter of having a bad hair day. They weren’t just battling a hangover. Their lives were persistently horrible because of disease, pain and incapacity.

And now Krauthammer would rob them of their only remaining human attribute, their dignity. “The last thing we should be doing,” he writes, “is relaxing what stigma and disapproval still attach to suicide.”

No, Mr. Krauthammer, we should not stigmatize these people, nor the physician who assisted them in ending their lives. Kevorkian should be judged, not by what the Nazis did, nor his appearance, nor even his theoretical writings of decades ago, but by what he did for the human beings who begged him to help them.

STEPHEN WYMAN

Hollywood

* For the record, I have the right to end my life any time I want. And, if the sad day came that I needed a doctor to help me end it with dignity, Mr. Krauthammer, stay as far away from me as possible.

LYNN ESCHBACH

Thousand Oaks