I was interviewed this morning by Susan Donaldson James, a digital reporter of ABC News. The story she was writing – now finished – concerned Stephen Hawking’s recent endorsement of assisted suicide and a little about the Barbara Mancini case.
Overall, I believe the perspectives of NDY were portrayed fairly in the story, even though some of my points were incompletely reported – more about that below. I believe those decisions were most likely made due to limitations on word count for the story rather than any other issue. Below is the link to the story, with some relevant excerpts:
Stephen Hawking Flip On Assisted Suicide Divides Right-to-Die Movement
Stephen Hawking, the brilliant theoretical physicist who has been on life support for 23 years battling ALS, has fueled a deep divide in the right-to-die movement by saying that those who have a terminal illness and are in pain should be able to end their lives “without prosecution.”
“We don’t let animals suffer, so why humans?” he told the BBC this week, noting that there should be adequate protections so that no one is condemned to die against their wishes.
“There must be safeguards that the person concerned genuinely wants to end their life and they are not being pressurized into it or have it done without their knowledge or consent as would have been the case with me,” he told the interviewer, according to the Guardian newspaper.
Advocates said his position reversal will help fuel more acceptance of physician-assisted death in the United States.
But a prominent disability group opposed to favorable laws in Oregon, Washington state and Montana, said Hawking’s words should not trump the “millions” of disabled Americans who say legalized “suicide” makes them more vulnerable.
Hawking, now 71 and the author of the scientific bestseller, “A Brief History of Time,” once called physician-assisted dying “a great mistake,” recalling a moment in 1985 when he had pneumonia and his first wife Jane Hawking had been given the opportunity to turn off all the machines.
One point I made about Hawking’s statement is that his “comfort zone” for legalization doesn’t exist as a law anywhere. For example, here in the US, the only real criterion in the states that have legalized assisted suicide (although we’re still not clear where Vermont will end up in terms of criteria) is that you have a prognosis of six months or less to live due to a terminal illness. Unremitting pain is not a requirement for “eligibility.” In Europe, countries like the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium and Switzerland have all adopted laws in which neither “terminal” nor “pain” are requirements for eligibility. Rather, those countries rely on a highly subjective and expansive criterion of “unrelievable” suffering.
The last sentence above begins a segment of the story that also serves to conflate the right to refuse treatment/suicide/assisted suicide, with Compassion and Choices’ Barbara Coombs Lee playing along.
Here’s the long part with me:
Stephen Drake, a research analyst for the disability rights group Not Dead Yet, said he worries that Hawking’s flip will resonate among those who are pushing for wider legal acceptance of euthanasia as in countries like the Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland.
Drake wrote a response to the Hawking interview on the Not Dead Yet website, “proving that being a genius in one area doesn’t stop you from staying stupid stuff outside of that area.”
Drake expressed concern that the “euthanasia movement” may use Hawking “as a weapon” by saying, “Look at this brilliant disabled genius. His voice counts for more than all of the disability activists who have spoken in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.”
Drake also took issue with Hawking’s comparison of animal suffering to human pain.
“That is a common remark in favor of assisted suicide,” he said. “In fact, it’s a myth. First, it ignores all the reality of factory farming and what we do to obtain meat. Those are anything but humane conditions.”
If laws treated humans like animals, that could open the door to more abuse against the sick and disabled, Drake said, adding that right-to-die laws that are “sold on the idea of pain and suffering” are “bad public policy.”
“The reasons are things like loss of physical autonomy, fear of being a burden and loss of dignity,” he said. “These are not medical issues, they are complex social issues.”
There are a couple of omissions here:
While I did indeed mention factory farming in the context of animal suffering, anyone who read yesterday’s reaction to Stephen Hawking knows that my main focus was exposing the common myths surrounding the “compassionate” reasons for pet euthanasia. I suspect that an explanation of that part of the response was a problem explained with my theory about word count limits.
Likewise, in the last sentence, “the reasons” refer to the documented reasons that have been reported that people actually seek assisted suicide.
The last part of the article contains brief comments by me that I’ve made elsewhere about the Barbara Mancini case in Pennsylvania. It’s a dream case for Compassion and Choices to see go to trial and shows a strange use of prosecutorial discretion.