Press Release: Not Dead Yet Joins Anti-Discrimination Lawsuit To Oppose Assisted Suicide Law

Los Angeles, CA — April 26, 2023 – Yesterday, the United Spinal Association (“United Spinal”), Not Dead Yet (“NDY”), Institute for Patients’ Rights (“IPR”), Communities Actively Living Independent & Free “CALIF”, and individual plaintiffs, Lonnie VanHook and Ingrid Tischer, filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, asking that California’s End of Life Option Act (EOLOA) be declared unlawful and unconstitutional.

“This lawsuit is a long-held dream come true for Not Dead Yet,” said Diane Coleman, president and CEO of NDY, a national disability organization. “We’re honored to join our fellow plaintiffs and attorneys to bring this fundamental disability rights challenge to the discrimination inherent in assisted suicide laws.”

NDY’s assistant director/policy analyst Jules Good says, “At a time where our rights are being stripped away, hateful laws are being enacted against LGBTQ+ members of our community, and disabled people of color are facing continued systemic violence, policies that make it easier for disabled people to die with help from their doctors are especially dangerous. Assisted suicide policies are inherently discriminatory, full stop.” 

NDY’s director of minority outreach, Anita Cameron, says, “As a Black disabled woman, I have experienced both racial and disability discrimination in healthcare. Although few Blacks and people of color request assisted suicide, as it becomes normalized across the country, racial disparities and the devaluing of the lives of disabled people will lead to people being forced, or ‘convinced’ to ask for assisted suicide.”

NDY’s New England regional director, John Kelly, says, “Ever since a spinal injury in 1984 left me ‘paralyzed from the neck down,’ I have been confronted by suggestions of death and suicide. People like my father who wished I had died in my accident, the people who said they’d rather be dead than like me, the presentation of suicide as the noble response to my disability in movies like ‘Whose Life Is It Anyway?’”

As NDY stated in our first friend of the court brief on assisted suicide filed 27 years ago in the U.S. Supreme Court:

Discrimination against people with severe disabilities pervades our society. Assisted suicide is the most lethal form of such discrimination. Applied only to people with significant health impairments, assisted suicide is the ultimate expression of society’s fear and revulsion regarding disability. …[P]eople with disabilities,…are discriminatorily denied the protection of suicide prevention laws, medical practice standards, and statutes prohibiting abuse, neglect and homicide that nondisabled persons receive. This double standard based on health status violates the ADA.

Those words are as true today as they were then. Assisted suicide data continue to show that unmet disability-related needs are at the heart of requests for assisted suicide, with inadequate supports leading to feelings of losing autonomy and being a burden.

“This lawsuit is our fight against a society and insurance industry that tells too many of us to hurry up and die,” Coleman says. “For all of us who’ve been denied the help we need to live, we’re not going to lay down and die. We’re Not Dead Yet and we’re fighting back.”