Having spent the better parts of our lives fighting for the rights of others to live, we are familiar with the death industry’s many attempts to cloak itself with a veneer of respectability. Whether its members champion killing through abortion, euthanasia, or assisted suicide, they always strive to make the elimination of vulnerable people appear palatable, even compassionate.
Now, the death dealers are at it again. They have linked one of history’s greatest champions of rights for the living to their anti-life efforts. It’s an outrageous disgrace.
Compassion & Choices, which euphemistically bills itself as “the nation’s oldest, largest and most active nonprofit organization committed to improving care and expanding options for the end of life,” has misappropriated the words and image of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. to promote its campaign for legalized assisted suicide.
On the 50th anniversary of King’s assassination, Compassion & Choices posted a photo of our nation’s most beloved civil rights leader with the words, “Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in healthcare is the most shocking and inhumane.”
The implications of the post is that laws against aiding or participating in suicides are somehow forms of inequality and are unjust, and that a doctor’s intentional participation in the taking of another’s life is a form of healthcare. Further, by using the image and words of King, Compassion & Choices is trying to link itself to a man who never uttered a word in support of its cause.
First of all, let’s examine the words attributed to King. As best as can be determined, similar, if not the same words were spoken at a 1966 convention of the Medical Committee for Human Rights in Chicago. While no recording or copy of King’s speech exists, the online authority QuoteInvestigator.com reports that several newspapers published an Associated Press story covering a press conference he held the night before the speech. In addressing the unequal levels of healthcare received by blacks and whites at the time, King told the press, “We are concerned about the constant use of federal funds to support this most notorious expression of segregation. Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health is the most shocking and the most inhuman because it often results in physical death.”
A subsequent newspaper account of Rev. King’s actual convention speech quoted him as saying, “Of all forms of discrimination and inequalities, injustice in health is the most shocking and inhuman. It is more degrading than slums, because slums are a psychological death while inequality in health means a physical death.”
The quote used by Compassion & Choices, then, was made in the context of racial discrimination in healthcare. He was concerned that this unequal treatment resulted in … wait for it … physical death. Whether intentionally or not, Compassion & Choices failed to include this last and key part of his statement. Suffice it to say, a quotation that argues against a policy because it results in physical death cannot honestly be used in favor of another policy that also results in physical death.
The use of King’s quote then leads us to the question of whether doctor-assisted suicide even qualifies as healthcare. Certainly, in 1966 when King spoke at the Medical Committee for Human Rights convention, neither euthanasia nor “aid in dying” were considered legitimate medical practices; neither should they be today. Compassion & Choices and other death dealers like to think that involving doctors turns their practice into medical care, but it doesn’t any more than having a lawyer administer a lethal injection qualifies it as legal aid.
It’s understandable that a group would like to link itself to King, a great man who was an uncle to one of us and a hero to both of us. But it’s not a compliment when the group seeking to associate itself with him is one that is antithetical to the cause for which he stood, life.
King was willing to lay down his life for others, but he would have never taken his own or anyone else’s. Compassion & Choices, a group that grew out of the more accurately named Hemlock Society, should stop peddling the poison of deceit.
Alveda King (@AlvedaCKing) and Frank Pavone (@frfrankpavone) are contributors to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. King is the director of Civil Rights for the Unborn at Priests for Life and the niece of Martin Luther King, Jr. Pavone is the national director of Priests for Life.
