Today, July 10, the Montreal Gazette published an op-ed by Not Dead Yet board chair Amy Hasbrouck. This op-ed is a response to the British Columbia Supreme Court decision that created a broad ‘right’ to suicide assistance. See below for a link to this excellent essay, along with an excerpt:
How about the right to cry for help?
court ruling asserting a person’s right to assisted suicide reflects discriminatory attitudes toward the disabled
Justice Smith doesn’t appear to believe that people with disabilities and terminal illness are ever coerced, persuaded, bullied, tricked or otherwise induced to end our lives prematurely. She believes those researchers who contend there have been no problems in jurisdictions where assisted suicide is legal, and she rejects evidence suggesting there have been problems.
She writes: “It is unethical to refuse to relieve the suffering of a patient who requests and requires such relief, simply in order to protect other hypothetical patients from hypothetical harm.”
I’ll have to mention that to some of my hypothetical friends who say they have been pressured by doctors, nurses and social workers to hypothetically “pull the plug.”
The same goes for all those folks who succumbed to the pressure; I guess they’re only hypothetically dead.
Read the rest of this excellent response at the Montreal Gazette.
What a gorgeous statement by Amy “Hasbrouck-no nonsense” (a bad but good pun if you pronounce Hasbrouck to “fit”). May I make two observations, please:
The odds that Judge Smith will just fall over and die at some point in a future without illness or disability in her life is very low. So, the judge will learn by experience. It’s another case of disabilophobia (my word, 2011). It’s time the judge got to know some people with severe disabilities, whether from birth, accident or illness. I had a brother-in-law who emigrated to Canada and got the same disabling illness as Michael J. Fox, the actor. But my beloved brother-in-law didn’t have the income nor supportive wife that the actor has. He survived for a few years in a nursing home and died at 63, still in good humor despite what I’d call substandard medical care. No autopsy and euphemism for nursing home. He was lucky, he had a lock on his room door. Did the judge ever consider the lack of privacy people with disabilities, of all ages, are given? The lack of respect? My brother-in-law loved life, although the pain in his abdomen was ascribed to “poor posture”.
And can we stop calling it “assisted suicide”? Assists is a sports term. Suicide is suicide and “assisted suicide” is legalized murder. A kind of death penalty for being disabled or ill.