Court after court has already declared that people with disabilities are essentially the same as people with terminal illnesses based on our perceived low quality of life. Many cases involve people with quadriplegia, often unnecessarily locked away in nursing homes.

No court questioned the suicidal feelings of Elizabeth Bouvia, David Rivlin, Larry McAfee, Hector Rodas or Kenneth Bergstedt. Courts superficially concluded that those individuals' suicidal despair was not treatable. They were granted a so-called "right to die" without being offered adequate supports for living. These highly publicized cases are the tip of the iceberg, and disabled people are beginning to feel that we are riding on the Titanic.

A west coast mother recently killed her brain injured teenaged daughter. The judge said her actions were understandable, that other parents could be expected to react in the same way, and he sentenced her to COMMUNITY SERVICE. A U.S. government report on child abuse recently found that children with disabilities are twice as likely to be abused as nondisabled children.

Assisted suicide proponents have reinforced public prejudice and fear regarding disability, lablelling it "pitiful," "helpless," "hopeless," "miserable," and inherently "undignified." This is an insult to our lifestyles. Experienced people with disabilities have learned that there's more to life than toileting independently.

Physicians must not be granted the power to decide who will be given suicide prevention and who will not. Research shows that physicians dramatically underestimate quality of life for people with disabilities compared to our own assessments.

According to a Dutch governmental report in 1990, in the Netherlands, 5,941 persons, including over 1,400 competent persons, were given lethal injections without consent, because of such express reasons as "low quality of life," "no prospect of improvement," and "the family could not take any more." (Doctor Assisted Suuicide and the Euthanasia Movement, ed. by Gary E. McCuen)

In the U.S., involuntary passive euthanasia of people with mental disabilities is already common. Medical rehabilitation specialists report that quadriplegics and other significantly disabled people are dying wrongfully in increasing numbers because emergency room physicians withhold aggressive treatment. Disabled people who use ventilators report that they are increasingly asked by medical personnel to consider "do not resuscitate" orders and withdrawl of life support. Children with non-terminal disabilities are killed by the denial of routine treatment. People with relatively mild disabilities are denied life saving organ transplants.

Indeed, the 9th Circuit Court decision in effect recognizes assisted suicide as an acceptable solution to the economic burdens of healthcare. The so-called "right to die" has become the "duty to die." Kevorkian has stated, "The voluntary self- elimination of ... mortally diseased and crippled lives taken collectively can only enhance the preservation of public health and welfare."

Many proponents of physician-assisted suicide believe that adequate safeguards can be adopted. If so, as a matter of equal protection, then they should be willing to allow physician- assisted suicide for any citizen, regardless of their health status. However, no one has proposed that physician-assisted suicide be made available to all citizens on a non-discriminatory basis. The fact is that they are willing to risk the lives of hundreds of thousands of severly disabled people who are not terminally ill in order to secure a right to assisted suicide for others. People with disabilities protest this cavalier devaluation of our lives.

With today's cutbacks in health care and the human service "safey net" and with growing isolation from the supports of families could once more easily provide, people's fears of aging, illness, disability, and the dying process are understandably growing.

But, particularly in the absense of a constitutional right to physician care, a right to physician-assisted suicide is not the answer.

We ask all who care about social injustice to believe us when we state that disability-based discrimination is deep-seated, virtually unconscious, pervasive and overwhelming. This discrimination against millions of Americans must be acknowledged, understood and reversed long before we can discuss expanding the ways in which society's unwanted can be killed.

We can only call upon this Congress and the good people of our nation to resist. We are the proverbial "canaries in the coalmine." If we are declared expendable, who will be next?"

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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© 2006 Tim Wheat