Dr. Death and the Prison Connection

by Chuck Colson                                                                                                                    Vol. X, No. 3, March 1997

            Dr. Jack Kevorkian is not called “Dr. Death” for nothing. He’s notorious for his macabre suicide machine, which has helped 45 people take their lives. But few realize that Kevorkian has been on the forefront of another crusade as well: the use of prison inmates and guinea pigs for medical research.

            Kevorkian is walking proof of the connection between life issues and prison issues.

            People sometimes challenge me for speaking out about abortion and euthanasia, questioning what these issues have to do with prisons. One large donor even threatened to cut off his support if I didn’t give up talking about abortion. (I didn’t ... and he did.)

            But there is a clear connection: A society’s treatment of human life is foundational to every other issue. And if we back down on respect for life, one of the first groups to suffer will be prisoners, as Kevorkian’s own record testifies. Right out of medical school in the 1950s, Kevorkian published “Medical Research and the death Penalty,” urging the use of condemned prisoners for medical experiments that violated ethical norms. Some experiments involved testing drugs and anesthesia on prisoners as they were being executed. Another experiment involved transfusing blood from prisoners immediately after they had died.

            Kevorkian still thinks these are good ideas. More recently, he has advocated using organs from executed prisoners for transplantation. Most other doctors are critical: They remember all too well the gruesome experiments done by the Nazis on concentration camp inmates.

            The parallel is instructive: How did the Nazis start on their grisly path? With the publication of professional papers in medical journals arguing that some lives are not “worthy of life,” and advocating abortion and euthanasia. Once that philosophy caught hold, the next step was experiments on prisoners — most of them Jews, gypsies, the handicapped, political and religious dissidents.

            Christianity teaches that human life is created by God and that no one has a moral right to destroy it (unless another life is at stake, as in self-defense or in just-war theory). Today that Christian philosophy is going head-to-head with a pragmatic naturalism that regards the human being as merely a complex animal, with no intrinsically higher dignity. Once a culture makes that philosophical shift, the first to be affected are the most vulnerable: the young, the ill, the infirm, minorities, and prisoners.

            This is not a far-fetched scenario. As recently as the 1950s, the federal government conducted a series of unethical radiation experiments on prisoners in Oregon. The issue at stake was put starkly by Dianne Bartels of the Center for Biomedical Ethics at the University of Minnesota: “I order to justify using prisoners, the researchers would have had to make a determination that they are somehow less than human or less important than the general population.” Indeed.

            The seeds of this paradigm change were planted in the 1930s, when many educated people in America and Europe were attracted to eugenics — the idea that society should eliminate “undesirables.” Today eugenics thinking is resurfacing in debates over abortion (targeted at certain racial and ethnic groups) and over euthanasia (targeted at the infirm). Let a budget crunch be severe enough, and we will almost surely hear questions raised about why we are keeping people alive on death row.

            Respect for life is a continuous chain. Break one link, and the effects will be felt all the way down the chain. That’s why abortion has always been about more than abortion, and that’s why I have taken such a strong stance on the life issues. In a recent issue of the journal First Things, I have argued that as our government legally sanctions abortion and euthanasia, it is imperiling its very legitimacy — for it is defaulting on the state’s most fundamental obligation: protecting people from the private exercise of lethal force.

            Jack Kevorkian is often treated as a crank, but he is actually the herald of a new philosophy that is already being accepted at the highest levels of government, especially the Supreme Court. To challenge that philosophy is not a distraction from prison and crime-related ministry; it is front-line work in maintaining a wall of legal protection for all who are weak or vulnerable.