Five Things a “TakePart.com” Author Really DIDN’T Know About Assisted Suicide

You learn something new every day.  Before today, I was totally unaware of the multimedia website Takepart.com, which describes itself this way:

TakePart is a digital media company with a singular mission: To make participating in positive change easy, rewarding, and part of everyday life. The articles, videos and actions we create build awareness of issues that shape our lives and culture, and provide ways to make a difference.

TakePart is a website, for one, and also a Social Action Network that includes individuals, NGOs, online communities and brands who share a common interest in making the world a better place. We are a division of Participant Media, which has produced culture-shifting films such as An Inconvenient Truth, The Cove, and Waiting for Superman.

To date, Participant has developed programs and active, working relationships with more than 300 non-profits. Collectively, we have the potential to reach more than 75 million people.

So they’re your typical bunch of affluent and well-connected self-proclaimed progressives who want to somehow put a bunch of different issues into that one box labeled “progressive.”

What called my attention to the site was something that appeared in my news feed titled “5 Things You Need to Know: Doctor Assisted Suicide.” 

The article – by Allan MacDonell – should have carried the more accurate title of “5 Things I Think I Know About Doctor Assisted Suicide”

The picture below – obviously of Not Dead Yet protesters at the Supreme Court – is posted along with MacDonell’s article.  You’d think, then, he’d know something about people with  disabilities and our concerns about assisted suicide and euthanasia.

The article gives no evidence of Mr. MacDonell having read anything at all by NDY – on our old website, any of our published articles, or material on this blog.

Mr. MacDonell’s “need to know” items are mostly misinformation and “straw man” version of anti assisted suicide/euthanasia arguments.

Here’s his opening:

Americans disagree on many things, and doctor-assisted suicide is the thing they disagree on the hardest. Oddly, veterinarians seem to be immune from the assisted-death controversy, despite the fact that almost every former kid in the country has at one time submitted a beloved pet to be “put to sleep.” An anti-euthanasia activist will be hard-pressed to find a person, other than a potential serial killer, who will assert that Scruffy or Spot or Balthazar would have been better served to wheeze out a few extra last days while being starved to death in a joy-blocking haze of pain, medication and intrusive surgical procedures.

Before even going into his “need to know” list, MacDonell perpetuates the myth that all pets are “put down” by loving owners because the animals are terminally ill and in pain.  As discussed on this blog and in an article I coauthored with Dick Sobsey, a minority of pets are euthanized because they are terminally ill and in pain.  One of the most recent factors in an increased rate of pet euthanasia is the economic downturn – people can’t afford their pets and have them euthanized – or abandon them to a shelter that does it.

So what about those “need to know” items?

I’ll leave those who read this blog to read the original article for the content of the first three items, which discuss the difference between euthansia and assisted suicide, death through withdrawal of feeding tube, and that assisted suicide is mostly what the author calls a “criminal mercy” in the US.

Number four is the one that gets to the real source of some of the most important distortions and omissions:

4) Meet four arguments that oppose assisted suicide. A) Improvements in hospice and palliative care have made physician-assisted suicide unnecessary. B) Patients have no right to cheapen the value of human life by seeking help in ending their own. C) Physician-assisted suicide is the first mossy flagstone on a slippery slope to officially sanctioned human depravity, sliding into the pit of involuntary euthanasia for persons with mental illnesses, physical handicaps or any characteristics deemed unsavory. D) Any physician who assists in a suicide violates the Hippocratic Oath to “first, do no harm.”

In A) the claim is partially true.  What’s left out is that pro-assisted suicide advocates are saying that the availability of palliative care is irrelevant to a person’s desire to get help to commit suicide.  Relatively few people who die under the Oregon law cite pain as a reason for wanting to commit suicide – the reasons of not wanting to be a burden or fear of losing autonomy are much more common.  As for B) – Frankly I have never heard the argument put quite that way by anyone – especially in the disability community.

As for item C) – with the snarky wording about the “first mossy flagstone on a slippery slope,” we’ve already slid – and continue to do so thanks to the advocacy of the pro-euthanasia/assisted suicide movement. Has MacDonell never heard of that (cough) sweet little old lady selling “suicide kits” to anyone who wants them and pays her 60 dollars?  Never heard of the Final Exit Network?  The group of “suicide vigilantes” who help just about anyone commit suicide because they don’t believe any law – including Oregon’s – gives people enough freedom to get “help” in committing suicide.

Then there is number 5 on the list:

5) Assisted suicide has spawned its own tourist industry. Switzerland, a prosperous European country of snowy Alps, pristine lakes and excellent watches and chocolate, has many attractions to tempt the leisured and sophisticated traveler. However, if you’re planning a trip to the Swiss skiing slopes, you might want to wait until you feel a lot more wretched and pessimistic about the coming days. Switzerland has allowed assisted suicide since 1941. One local company, Dignitas, has helped 1,138 people die over the past 13 years—with clients hailing from Germany, Great Britain and France. Zurich’s voters recently shot down a proposed ban on suicide tourism with a 78 percent majority, disagreeing hardly at all.

This is all true.  But the enormous support the public shows for Dignitas argues against the author’s implied premise that “slippery slopes” are nothing to worry about.  You see, Mr. MacDonell forgot to mention that Dignitas will facilitate the suicide of anyone – young, old, healthy, ill, disabled, able-bodied – it doesn’t matter to Dignitas.  They’ll help you as long as you can pay their pretty exorbitant fees.

I’m used to people who think they are somehow progressive disagreeing with disability activists and advocates on these issues.  What I have never gotten used to is the willingness of these same folks to render us invisible or distort our true positions in this important public policy debate.

We’re not stupid, paranoid, or delusional.  We’ve just been paying attention. –Stephen Drake

Note – Couple of minor edits made today.  One spelling error and a two-word omission in a sentence pointed out to me by Allan MacDonell.