Crippen Cartoonist (aka Dave Lupton) is a brilliant cartoonist and a disability rights activist. In my current mode of “catch-up,” I want to point people to his latest blog entry, which as usual, features cartoon, with click-able full text description.
The latest entry is titled “Making assisted suicide more accessible?!” Here are the first few paragraphs:
16 June 2011
A non-disabled friend of mine expressed suprise that not only was I unwilling to help him ensure that assisted suicide would be made fully accessible to disabled people, but that I was also very much against the idea of assisted suicide being made legal in the first place!
Recently retired from a life in the medical profession, John is now serving in a voluntary capacity on a panel set up to address the issue of making assisted suicide legal. In his – in other areas commendable – awareness of disability equality he wanted to make sure that assisted suicide would be equally accessible to disabled people and he wondered if I would be able to help him think through some of the associated issues.
It became clear as I started to explain my position on this subject, that he hadn’t considered there would be people vehemently opposed to the whole concept of helping someone commit suicide. His rational medical mind had seen it purely as a way of helping people who were too ill to continue living, and who had made a decision when they’d been able to do so, to obtain assistance to end their life in a dignified and peaceful manner.
Anyone who’s a regular reader here or who has entered into this kind of situation can see where this is going. Sometimes nothing constructive happens at all, sometimes you get through, or at least somewhat.
Read the rest of the blog entry – and the long comment thread – to see how it turned out. –Stephen Drake
Assisted suicide no matter how humanely they make it sounds, is still not acceptable to me, but I am only talking for myself, because I believe that no one has the right to take or end someone’s life.