Not Dead Yet, Press Release

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Disability Advocates Relieved Over Defeat of Assisted Suicide

People with disabilities across the U.S. and in Hawaii expressed relief over the defeat of the assisted suicide bill last night. Eleven national disability organizations have taken a position against legalization of assisted suicide. Many of them have chapters in Hawaii.

This disability opposition is not based on any religious perspective, and these organizations are strong supporters of civil rights. In fact, our opposition to legalization of assisted suicide is that it violates our right to equal protection of the law, and violates the Americans With Disabilities Act, to set up a double standard for the manner in which society responds to suicidal people, a two-tired system whereby some people are given suicide intervention and others are given suicide assistance.

I'm relieved, says Susan Golden, who uses a motorized scooter to get around. I think it's bad public policy to put killing in the hands of those who are supposed to be healers. Golden is a disability activist and longtime member of Not Dead Yet, the leading disability group opposing assisted suicide and euthanasia in the U.S.

In Oregon, on which the opponents of our equality under the law rely most heavily, the state reports demonstrate: (1) that up to 466 days has passed between the request for a lethal prescription and death, so, clearly, people with non-terminal conditions (death in 180 days) are receiving lethal prescriptions; and (2) people are mostly requesting assisted suicide because of psycho-social issues, such as feeling like a burden on family, and fears about future loss of function associated with increases in disability. People with disabilities are very familiar with these issues from personal experience, and we do not consider it "choice" for a society to address these issues by ensuring the death of the individual.

Ron Amundson, a philosophy professor at the University of Hawaii at Hilo, thinks that people need to start looking beyond the soundbites and looking at the broader social factors related to the issue.

Terminally ill or disabled people sometimes do have suicidal feelings when they feel ashamed of their own condition, or when they feel that they are a burden on their families, he says. The desire for death under those conditions is not free, but forced. Amundson, a wheelchair user, is another long term member of Not Dead Yet.

If assisted suicide is such a good thing, if it's really about "autonomy," then why not make it available to all suicidal people, why just for old, ill and disabled people? Assisted suicide advocates call it "death with dignity," because they see disability as profoundly undignified. The discrimination inherent in assisted suicide laws, the devaluation of old, ill and disabled people at the heart of these laws, and the fear and revulsion toward disability in the pro-assisted suicide leadership, must be rejected. As our society ages, medical killing cannot be the answer to the challenges that await us.