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11/30/98, 3:31 pmcst
Last night on CBS's 60 Minutes, an entire nation witnesses Jack Kevorkian's video-taped killing of a 52-year-old man with ALS. Since 1990, Kevorkian admits assisting in the suicides of over 120 individuals. According to the Detroit Free Press, the overwhelming majority of these individuals have been people who did not have terminal illnesses, but people who had disabilities, often less severe than my own.
My name is Diane Coleman and I am founder and President of Not Dead Yet, a national activist group leading the disabled community's fight against legalization of assisted suicide and euthanasia. If Kevorkian were assisting members of any other minority group to die, gays or African-Americans for example, he would be in jail by now and would never have gotten the bully pulpit of 60 Minutes for the atrocity he committed. But 60 Minutes, and most of the media, have long supported his cause as socially progressive, without ever even considering the views of the minority group to which his victims belong. The fact that he is still on the streets is not because our suicides are in fact fundamentally different, more justified than others people's suicides, but because society's prejudice against us is so deep and pervasive that we are seen as better off dead. Much of the media has made Kevorkian a hero, so much so that juries of non-disabled people won't convict him - yet. How many more of our people must die before he is brought to justice?
According to the U.S. census, people with disabilities - seniors, adults and children - are the largest minority group in the country. We have the highest unemployment rate of all minorities - not because we can't work, but because employers and health insurance companies won't accept us. So people lose their jobs, can't get new jobs, and are forced into poverty. Families and friends often abandon people with disabilities, or treat them like unwanted burdens. It's hard to get the home health and support services that our health care system should provide to make things easier. Many people find themselves in human warehouses called nursing homes.
Most people don't know very much about the history of the disability rights movement. Our struggles have been fought on the margins of society's awareness. Few are aware of the hundreds of us who were arrested and jailed in the fight for passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act. We've rarely been on the media's radar screen, except as tragic but courageous human interest stories, objects of pity in Jerry Lewis' Telethon. The public doesn't know about the war we are now waging to free our brothers and sisters from nursing homes. As far as the network news is concerned, our political movement does not exist.
But suddenly the victims of our struggle have been thrown into the limelight - not the leaders of our civil rights marches, not our crusaders in Washington, not the countless unsung heroes who fight each day against poverty and human isolation - but the victims of Jack Kevorkian who gave up in their struggle and found a serial killer folk hero and his lawyer who built fame from the destruction of their lives. Perhaps for the first time, our movement is not on the margins, but at the center of a major public debate.
Look at the real reasons people with disabilities came to Kevorkian. We, who have the same health conditions, we know it wasn't the condition that bothered them most. The reasons they sought his help included fear of being forced into a rat infested nursing home, like Wallace Spolar, loss of custody of a child, like Sherry Miller, a husband's affair with another woman, like Lorretta Peabody. Rather than addressing these underlying issues and providing the support people need to live, the public and media have looked only at the disability. Their prejudice and ignorance about how we live gave them reason to watch us die, over and over, leaving a serial killer on the streets to kill again.
Some people say that assisted suicide is just a personal choice, exercising control over one's own body. "Choice" is nice rhetoric to borrow, but that's not what's really going on, is it? If it were just a matter of choice, our society would offer that choice to any competent adult. But no euthanasia group is suggesting that.
According to Stephen Drake, Not Dead Yet's leading expert on Kevorkian, "The press have ignored his primary agenda to push for a class of human beings on which doctors can do live experimentation and organ harvesting. In his book, Prescription Medicide, he writes that assisted suicide is just a first step to achieving public acceptance of this agenda." In written testimony that Kevorkian submitted in his first trial, he said:
"The voluntary self-elimination of individual and mortally diseased or crippled lives taken collectively can only enhance the preservation of public health and welfare."
In an article, he writes that disabled infants and seniors with Alzheimers should also be targets of euthanasia. So much for "voluntary self- elimination." In his book, Kevorkian says that he invented his suicide machine for people like a quadriplegic man he met who was stuck in a nursing home and wanted to get out. It was David Rivlin in the 1980's, before Kevorkian started his killing spree. David Rivlin asked for freedom and no one listened. Then he asked for death, and everyone helped; they turned off his ventilator, and called it an act of courage.
Now people ask, "Are we worried about Kevorkian becoming a martyr if he starves himself in jail?" No - the real martyrs are his victims, martyrs to society's bigotry - it's called able-ism. And it's just as deadly as racism, just as wrong as sexism. If Kevorkian were a racist killer, he'd be in jail.
Some argue, "Yes, we have laws governing how society will normally respond to prevent suicide, but we can carve out an exception to those laws for certain people. After all, these people may need help to do it."
Sometimes analogies are helpful. According to the Detroit Free Press, four out of five completed suicides are by men, but women try to commit suicide three times as often as men. Would we consider legalizing assisted suicide for women? This could be done with usual so-called safeguards, requiring that the woman make the request for assistance two times in a fourteen-day period, and is not being coerced in any way evident to two disinterested witnesses who have no financial stake in her demise. Don't we want to make sure that women can exercise their choice for suicide and not risk botching the attempt? Well, I think anyone can see that a law like that would constitute illegal sex discrimination.
I wish that the civil rights violation of legalizing assisted suicide based on health status were as obvious to everyone as it would be if assisted suicide were legalized based on gender or race. It is obvious to the following national disability organizations which have adopted positions opposing legalization of assisted suicide: the National Council on Independent Living, the National Council on Disability, the World Institute on Disability, ADAPT, Justice for All, TASH, the National Spinal Cord Injury Association, the World Association of Persons With Disabilities and, of course, Not Dead Yet. Why are we ignored?
Why has the media been so biased in favor of the euthanasia movement? Why have they excluded the voices of the endangered minority from the euthanasia debate? Assisted suicide has been portrayed as a progressive social cause, ignoring its implications in a society with over 40 million uninsured. Michigan voters, including a large majority of African-Americans, just defeated an assisted suicide referendum. Meanwhile in Oregon, where assisted suicide has been legalized, the Medicaid agency is cutting a variety of health services important to the disabled and chronically ill, and at the same time planning to fund assisted suicide.
Who are the lead proponents of assisted suicide? - The Hemlock Society, who's members have a median income of $52,000 a year. They are the 4 W's, the white well-off worried well. They don't care how many of our people are encouraged - even pressured - to die, so long as they themselves can have the security of a clean, neat, sanitized suicide at the hands of a medical professional.
While Hemlock lobbyists continue to maintain a public perception that they are only talking about voluntary assisted suicide for terminally ill people, their proposed legislation in fact extends to all people with incurable conditions. See it on their web site. In addition, Last December 3rd, the Hemlock Society issued a widely ignored press release which asked that family members and other "agents" be able to procure court orders to kill "a demented parent, a suffering severely disable [sic] spouse, or a child" if their lives are "too burdensome to continue." That's involuntary euthanasia.
Medical discrimination against people with disabilities, especially those who are poor, is nothing new. In 1989, the U.S. Civil Rights Commission issued a 153-page report entitled Medical Discrimination Against Children With Disabilities. Among the information considered by the Commission was an experiment conducted from 1977 to 1982 at the Children's Hospital of Oklahoma. Doctors there developed a quality of life formula for babies with spina bifida which took into account the socioeconomic status of the baby's family to determine what to advise them about a simple but life-and-death procedure. Better-off families were provided a realistic and optimistic picture of their child's potential, while poor families were provided a pessimistic picture. Four out of five poor families accepted the doctors' advice and 24 babies lost their lives. The US Civil Rights Commission concluded:
To accept a projected negative quality of life . . . based on the difficulties society will cause . . ., rather than tackling the difficulties themselves, is unacceptable. The Commission rejects the view that an acceptable answer to discrimination and prejudice is to assure the 'right to die' to those against whom the discrimination and prejudice exists.
Bioethicists are now writing about health care economics and the idea that some of us, whose health care services will cut into insurance company profits, have a duty to die, voluntarily or not. Especially in these days of managed care and government health care budget cuts, older and disabled people have a lot to be worried about. Society is struggling with policy issues that all come down to the question whether people are more or less important than profits.
For the majority of people with disabilities, whose only information about living with disability comes from health care providers, today's trends do not bode well. I am especially concerned about newly injured people. 8,000 new people are spinal cord injured each year, and 99,000 are hospitalized with moderate to severe head injuries. In critical periods after injury, people and their families could easily be swayed to make a so-called "choice" for death. So many of my colleagues with disabilities who now enjoy their lives have told me that they doubt they would have survived the first stages of their injuries in today's climate.
But do the media examine this larger social context in an objective way? Not so far. In fact, when Mike Wallace interviewed a disabled woman earlier this year, he asked her if she wanted to go to Kevorkian. She said she didn't want to die now, even though she did not think she wanted to be alive ten years from now. Then he asked her if she felt like a burden on society, and discussed the costs of her health care. Jimmy the Greek and Andy Rooney were disciplined for insulting gays and African-Americans, but Mike Wallace can get away with openly questioning the value of a disabled woman's life and making a hero out of a serial killer of our minority.
We disabled people begin to feel like we are in the South in the 1950's, where a killer could get away with murder based on the minority status of their victim. Kevorkian belongs in jail - it's the only way to stop him from killing one more disabled person. We demand that the Michigan prosecutor do his duty. Bring him to justice.
The Memphis Center for Independent Living
1633 Madison Avenue,
Memphis, TN 38104
(901) 726-6404 v/tty (901) 726-6521 fax
mcil@mcil.org
MCIL is a United Way of the Mid-South member Agency
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