Disability Activist Stephanie Woodward Quoted In An NY Newspaper Article

An article in the Altamont Enterprise included some great quotes by disability rights activist Stephanie Woodward.

Stephanie Woodward, director of advocacy at the Center for Disability Rights, said that “assisted suicide has a discriminatory, disparate impact on disabled people that is deadly and can’t be reversed.”

Data from the state of Oregon, where medical aid-in-dying has been allowed for over two decades, according to Woodward, shows that the top five reasons people choose assisted suicide have nothing to do with pain, but instead have to do with disabling conditions, like “feeling like a burden on my family,” or “feeling like you have a loss of autonomy or independence,” or “loss of bladder or bodily function control.”

Actually, in the data, these responses do not fall under a heading of reasons for wanting to die, but “end of life concerns.”

Woodward said, “These are all disabling conditions that people with disabilities face every single day, and we don’t believe that they should be a basis for wanting to die.”

The idea that they do make terminally ill people in Oregon want to die clearly shows the need for more supports and services, Woodward said, adding, “If our health care does not provide the services and support people need to live, then we cannot create an option to die and call it an option.”

Unfortunately, Woodward’s important insights are left till near the end. The article focuses on a few people who want assistance to commit suicide, downplaying the fact that what assisted suicide bills really do is grant a virtually unassailable immunity to doctors and other people involved in the death. In practical terms, the bills offer no protections for a patient from healthcare providers or family members who have financial or other motives to coerce or engage in any form of foul play. 

The article also discusses how hospice is insufficient, but then provides examples of people getting healthcare treatments they don’t want. These examples make no sense given the clear right to refuse treatment. Despite all the article’s comments about hospice, it never mentions the surprising fact that New York has an extremely low rate of hospice use – it’s #48 in the nation.

Michael Burgess of Guilderland, the former director of the New York State Office for the Aging and a spokesman for the New York Alliance Against Assisted Suicide, said he likes to seek common ground; what people on both sides of this issue have in common, he emphasized, is concern for people who are suffering at the end of life.

“A lot of older people can be depressed and can feel like it’s time to go,” Burgess said, “or they feel like they’re being encouraged in that direction.”

Burgess wants to see hospice and palliative care expanded and more widely publicized, so that more people know more about it. Also key, he says, are social and spiritual support. Having a “network of care” in place that includes all of those elements, he said, even in states like Oregon that have enacted legislation, can often be enough, he said.

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