Press Release
Contacts: John Kelly 617-952-3302; Anita Cameron 585-259-8746
(Manchester, NH) – Not Dead Yet’s director of minority outreach, Anita Cameron, will join disability rights leaders from the Brain Injury Association of New Hampshire, ABLE New Hampshire, Disability Rights Center and other state and local groups to oppose a New Hampshire assisted suicide bill, HB 1659, being heard before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday, February 12 at 1:00 p.m.
Cameron was among scores of disability activists arrested during national protests by disabled people to save Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act in 2017. Among other issues, Cameron will share the story of her mother’s mistaken “terminal” diagnosis in her testimony against the NH assisted suicide bill.
“In June, 2009, while living in Washington state, my mother was determined to be in the final stages of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease and placed in hospice. Two months later, I was told that her body had begun the process of dying. My mother wanted to go home to Colorado to die, so the arrangements were made. Once she got there, her health began to improve! Over ten years later, she is still alive, lives in her own home in the community and is reasonably active.”
John Kelly, director of Second Thoughts and NDY’s New England regional director, will submit written testimony. “We renounce the implication in this bill that some people are ‘better dead than disabled,’” he states. “Either everyone has equal amounts of dignity or we no longer live in a society where everyone is equal under the law.”
The bill’s purpose statement focuses on disability concerns as a reason for implementing assisted suicide: “Many terminally ill patients experience severe, unrelenting suffering, mental anguish over the prospect of losing control and independence, and/or embarrassing indignities for long periods while they are waiting to die . . ..”
NDY’s president and ceo will also submit written testimony. “As a severely disabled person who depends on life-sustaining treatment, the Statement of Purpose in HB 1659 makes it crystal clear that someone like me would be viewed as sitting right in the bill’s crosshairs.”