The following are excerpts from an excellent piece by columnist Dominic Lawson. He arranged to visit SCOPE, the UK disability charity that published the results of a survey earlier this year, finding that 70% of disabled respondents expressed concerns about their own safety if assisted suicide was legalized in the UK.
Lawson was allowed to watch and listen to a focus group – one of many SCOPE is conducting to get more qualitative data – through a one-way glass. From comments Lawson makes in his column, I’m assuming that group participants were informed of his observation, although I’d like it stated a little more clearly.
The following are excerpts from Lawson’s column in the June 14th edition of The Independent. It’s titled Why the disabled fear assisted suicide:
Last month Scope released one of the results, a poll by ComRes, which revealed that no fewer than 70 per cent of disabled people are concerned that the changes in the law advocated by Pratchett would create pressure on vulnerable patients to “end their lives prematurely”. Scope has also been conducting focus groups of people with cerebral palsy, in order to add qualitative research to the quantitative findings of pollsters; the charity invited me to attend one of these encounters, and to observe many hours of such discussions from behind one-way glass alongside a group of its full-time employees.
The bulk of the column is devoted to stories about threats already being encountered, fear of an uncertain future and even fear of one’s own family. The following is almost at the end of Lawson’s column:
The opinions expressed by “Bill” and Andy had a striking effect on Valerie Lang, a 71-year-old from Islington in north London. Valerie admitted that her mind had been “substantially changed” by what she had heard. At the end of the meeting she said: “I know there will come a time when my body won’t have given out, but my patience jolly well will; and I will want to go to Dignitas when that happens. But I have been reminded of how vulnerable people, less strong-minded than me, can be open to suggestion.”Valerie had told the group earlier that she had spent 20 years “falling in and out of depression” until therapy had enabled her to come to terms with her cerebral palsy. Since then she had had a remarkable life, despite her severe disability: she had become a senior research officer in the Civil Aviation Authority’s Economics Division and since her retirement had, as she put it, “sat on many committees, but have now reduced these to about six”. It is easy to see how under a system of legalised assisted suicide, Valerie’s earlier years of depression at her condition might well have been ended; and as Richard Hawkes points out, “the thing about suicide is that it doesn’t allow for second thoughts”.Something else Valerie said at the meeting struck me as dreadfully sad: “When I was younger, if I fell over in the street two or three people would always rush to pick me up. Now people just walk past. I am no longer even part of the scenery.”That is the state of mind, on both sides, in which assisted suicide for the severely physically disabled could so insidiously turn from being a liberating option into something more like an oppressive social obligation.
The only thing I’ll add here is that the way that Valerie gets ignored when she falls over in the street these strikes me as more than “sad.” It strikes me as one more symptom of a (nondisabled) population that view us with disdain, scorn and even resentment.
Please read the rest for yourself by clicking here. –Stephen Drake