With assisted suicide bills pending in many states, disability rights advocates are needed to help oppose them. Not Dead Yet Colorado just played a pivotal role in defeating an assisted suicide bill in that state, but bills are pending or expected in California, New York, Pennsylvania, Iowa, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, the District of Columbia and more.
Many of the national disability rights groups that oppose assisted suicide bills have chapters, affiliates and members in these states, so Not Dead Yet has developed a Toolkit to assist them in advocating successfully. NDY’s Disability Rights Toolkit for Advocacy Against Legalization of Assisted Suicide has embedded links to excellent resources on the assisted suicide issue, many of them provided by the Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund, including a very important legislative primer entitled “A Progressive Case Against Assisted Suicide Laws.”
The seven sections of the NDY Toolkit cover:
- Why disability advocacy groups oppose legalizing assisted suicide
- Educating and organizing disability opposition
- Meeting with legislators and policy leaders
- Testifying at hearings
- Working with the media
- Conducting direct actions – leafleting, rallying
- Working in coalition
Advocacy organizations may also like to include an article on the issue in organizational newsletters: Why Do Disability Rights Organizations Oppose Assisted Suicide Laws?
We encourage advocates to contact Diane Coleman or John Kelly at NDY or Marilyn Golden at DREDF for information and assistance in using the NDY Toolkit and working to oppose the dangers inherent in assisted suicide laws.
Should the medical doctors really be entrusted with the matter of killing?
So, who wants to be killed is requested to turn to the medical doctor. Control? Not provided. Even in the Netherlands, where the assembly line-like killing is executed with an ever fasting rate, there are supervisory bodies. That these are good for nothing, and that they are not even supposed to control anything, is another matter. However, the Dutch parliamentarians at least believed that they could not do without this fig leaf of public oversight. In Germany for example, there is not even that. So, regarding the fundamental issue of life and death, there exists a Black Box in the very core of our society. You can fly to the moon and see, how it looks like. But that white-coated heart of darkness is located beyond any external access and protected against each controlling gaze from the outside. A Black Box to which only the medical doctor has got access, and so does the death candidate. The latter, however, only gets in and never gets out again. At least not alive. No one, in the hindsight, will ever be able to control anything. Is it entirely inconceivable that medical doctors, for instance, in order to cover up their own therapy mistakes, exercise massive pressure on the patient, whose life they have destroyed, to commit self-murder? It is really unbelievable that such laws could even be discussed!
I found it very helpful to read what the Patients; Front / Socialist Patients’ Collective has to say on this topic Their website: http://www.spkpfh.de/index_english.html – Section: Defend yourselves against the primary (proto-)medical Modern-EuthaNAZIsm (so-called assisted dying, euthanasia). Attack!
What about starting a petition to oppose the legislation on Change.org or Care2?