Last week, I was quoted in an Associated Press article about the legal challenge mounted by Final Exit Network (FEN) and one of the group’s supporters in a Georgia courtroom. I wrote about it in the last post on this blog. The more recent article, by AP reporter Greg Blustein, takes a broader look at the case and gives more information on the supporter, a woman with Huntington’s disease. Here’s a link to the story on the Huntington Post, which generally keeps AP stories online and accessible.
Here is the short segment with my quote, with some explanation added afterwards:
Critics say the group sends a dangerous message to society.
“It says that we’ll look the other way when not-so productive people commit suicide, that they are burdens and that society isn’t that troubled to see them die,” said Stephen Drake of the group Not Dead Yet.
As I recall, I made this statement in reaction to what it would mean if the courts decided to leave FEN alone – leave them to their “assisting” the suicides of old, ill and disabled people (assistance might include things such as helping to get the “client” over their ambivalence, holding their hands down, and cleaning up the area after the person dies to hide the fact that the death occurred through suicide).
So my reaction was aimed at the message sent to people with disabilities and the elderly if the legal system decided to give FEN a free pass.
Although not in the article, I also shared my belief that there was a lot more support in the general population for encouraging or facilitating suicides among old, ill and disabled people – but that the reasons have little to do with compassion or a deep respect for autonomy.
Nope. We’re in a deep economic crisis and there is, I believe, a growing sentiment that if someone living on Social Security, or who gets their medical care through Medicare or Medicaid, or depends on taxpayer-supported assistance for anything – if any of these folks die earlier rather than later then it’s a boon to the public welfare. They won’t say it out loud, of course. But it’s implied in some of the rhetoric about the “waste” of dollars on the elderly by people on the left and in the rhetoric of deficit hawks and Tea Partiers.
This isn’t a new insight, although, this dynamic may be more imminent now than it has been since I started working in this arena. No – the first analysis of this kind that I ever read was written by Derek Humphry and Mary Clement in the book Freedom to Die: people, politics, and the right-to-die movement.
The book was written in 2000. The second-to-last chapter is titled “The Unspoken Argument.” This seems a very appropriate time to remind people of what Humphry and Clement had to say ten years ago:
“Similar to other social issues, the right-to-die movement has not arisen separate and distinct from other concurrent developments of our time. In attempting to answer the question Why Now?, one must look at the realities of the increasing cost of health care in an aging society, because in the final analysis, economics, not the quest for broadened individual liberties or increased autonomy, will drive assisted suicide to the plateau of acceptable practice. As technology advances, as medical costs skyrocket out of control, as chronic diseases predominate, as the projected rate of the eighty-five-and-older population accelerates, as managed care seeks to cut costs and as Medicare is predicted to go bankrupt by 2007, the impetus of cost containment provide impetus, whether openly acknowledged or not, for the practicalities of an assisted death.” (Emphasis added.)
Obviously, some of their projections were off. At the same time, though, I think we should all take this seriously as an unusually honest analysis coming from the pro-euthanasia movement. And we can use Humphry’s words to level the charge that the growing sympathy for assisted suicide is nothing more than a cost containment measure masquerading as compassion. –Stephen Drake
Addendum – there is more to this chapter than the opening statement shared here, but it all goes to support that initial claim. I plan on returning to this chapter in the future and how it relates to the current realities we are dealing with right now.