Since Not Dead Yet started, we’ve seen that the proponents of assisted suicide consist of what we call the “4 W’s” – the white, well-off, worried worried well. That hasn’t changed.
Last week, columnist Debra J. Saunders discussed the role that class, income and race play out in the debate in that state over legalization of assisted suicide. Here are a couple of excerpts from her excellent column, “Assisted suicide: help the rich to not get too much care“:
The assisted-suicide movement is the rare self-proclaimed civil rights movement that exists to cater to the wishes of affluent Americans. Tuesday, the state Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on SB128, a bill to legalize assisted suicide in California. (Proponents don’t like the word suicide, so they call the measure the “End of Life Option Act.”) Supporters talked of their fear of medical personnel prolonging their lives, of pain and lack of autonomy; opponents fear that the bill’s passage would represent a callous act of cultural abandonment of the sick and disabled.
And then there’s the issue of race:
California has world-class medical care. This bill seeks to address a “First World problem,” noted Tim Rosales from the opposition. Rosales steered me toward Ken Barnes, a San Diego management consultant who used to be on the executive committee of the California conference of the NAACP. Barnes handily summed up SB128 supporters: They tend to be white, educated, affluent and able to navigate the health system. While they think they are “progressive,” they are as oblivious to the downside for “people of color and people who don’t know how to advocate for themselves.” They’re like white guys who don’t understand why black men are leery of police.
I want to reinforce this point. A Pew Poll published in November, 2013 reported that only 29% of Blacks polled and 32% of Hispanics polled supported legislation that would legalize assisted suicide.
The issues of race, class and privilege don’t get aired nearly often enough in this debate.
Please go to the original column and read it in its entirety – it’s truly excellent and deserves all attention it can get.
“I do not want to live my last days in a wheelchair, fully paralyzed, connected to a breathing machine,” she said. “To me, that is the picture of horror.”
This pretty much confirms what I have suspected for some time now: the proponents of assisted suicide are utterly terrified of dying like a disabled person. “Dying like a cripple” in other words.
There are people who live in wheelchairs, fully paralyzed and using breathing apparatuses, and have no wish to die, and yet the woman who said this [Christina Symonds], thinks this is the picture of horror.
The abled fear disability in any form, and are afraid of having to live in a disabled state, even if it’s in the last few days/months/years of their life.
And they’ll do anything they can to avoid it, too.
Bring on assisted suicide, because we wouldn’t want the abled to ever have to deal with disability at any point in their lives, right?
This bill, if passed, will throw California back to a time where people of color had no rights. At the same time, as one who does not advocate for assisted suicide, I feel that California will make the medical issues present even worse.
“Since Not Dead Yet started, we’ve seen that the proponents of assisted suicide consist of what we call the “4 W’s” – the white, well-off, worried well. That hasn’t changed….”
In his preface to the book of the Socialist Patients’ Collective: SPK – Turn Illness into a Weapon, Jean-Paul Sartre gets to the heart of this Class, Race and Privilege Issue in what the patients of the SPK / Patients’ Front have properly termed Iatro-Capitalism with its fundamental antagonism: patients’ class against doctors’ class.
Sartre says: “Therefore, there are in the existing society two sorts of people: one is either adapted to fit in, or, according to medical standards, one is norm-less and garbage. Among those adapted to fit in there are, in turn, also two sorts of people, both of them being likewise inconspicuous, but ill, though without having conscience of that. The medical doctor presents the first of this sort of ill people to the public as a piece of evidence proofing that they comply with the normative standards and that they are valuable. These are the ill ones, whose symptoms and complaints fit in with capitalist production. The second sort of adapted ill people are those whose symptoms and complaints have been re-adapted coercively to capitalist production by the use of therapeutic-terrorist means.
The others, however, are the norm-less and garbage, ill people (the ill-ill ones), those who are, by reason of an un-aimed revolt, incapable to do iatro-capitalist wage-labor; an un-aimed revolt that simply becomes manifest in them: disturbing, disgusting, ugly, ‘killjoys’, looser-like, “at best” painful and deplorable. This ill wage-dependent, then, as a patient, is passing, from physician to physician, through the inter/intra-medical chain-reactions of being diagnosed.
The entire Sartre-Text can be read on the SPK/PF-website: http://www.spkpfh.de/Preface_Sartre.htm