Assisted suicide laws violate the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) but not in the way that proponents probably think. Some have argued that the ADA requires active euthanasia for qualified people whose disabilities make it difficult to self-administer lethal drugs, a sort of “reasonable accommodation” theory. Some have suggested that the U.S. should adopt the Canadian approach of medically assisting the deaths of people with non-terminal health conditions (i.e., disabilities).
In contrast, from our beginning in 1996, we see a more fundamental form of disability discrimination in assisted suicide laws. They set up a two-tiered system where some people who express suicidal feelings get suicide prevention while others get suicide assistance and the difference is disability. Not Dead Yet has detailed this ADA violation in friend-of the-court briefs over the years, but we have now joined with three other disability and patient advocacy groups and two disabled individuals in a lawsuit taking this social justice argument to the next level. It’s the fight for our lives.
The system is broken, inequities in healthcare abound, and insurers care more about their bottom line than people.
Throughout modern history to the present day, the lives of people with disabilities have been devalued in a society that sees our lives as less worth living, less worthy of scarce medical resources and healthcare dollars, better off dead.
We are individuals with disabilities and non-profit organizations that work for disability and patient rights. As we find ourselves fighting for healthcare equity – the basic care, long term services and supports, and durable medical equipment we need to live – enter California’s so-called ‘End of Life Options Act’ (EOLOA).
Under EOLOA, people with life-threatening disabilities and only people with life-threatening disabilities who say they want to die can get a state-facilitated death. Everyone else gets suicide prevention and the protections afforded by the law and professional standards. That’s not choice, it’s eugenics.
People of color, especially those who are economically marginalized, are more likely to be steered towards suicide by their providers, who may view their lives as less worthy of preservation due to the combined forces of racism and ableism. Research has documented Black, Asian, and Hispanic persons regularly experience “barriers to palliative/hospice care utilization.” A 2016 JAMA Internal Medicine study found that hospice patients were less likely to be visited by staff in their last two days of life if they were Black. Even more alarming, California nursing facilities with higher numbers of Black and Latino residents have “had higher rates of death.” Stopping California’s assisted suicide law is both a disability rights and health equity issue.
EOLOA violates the Americans with Disabilities Act, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, and the US Constitution, so we filed a case in federal district court asking for it to be permanently enjoined as inherently discriminatory.
Legal Synopsis
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is an important federal law that prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities in various aspects of life including medical treatment. The ADA defines disability as a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life functions. The ADA also protects people who have a record of such an impairment, even if they do not currently have a disability, as well as individuals who do not have a disability but are regarded as having a disability.
Individuals who are facing life-threatening conditions qualify as people with disabilities under the ADA, as those conditions themselves not only cause physical and/or mental impairments, but are also impairments that substantially limit major life functions. The lawsuit seeks to establish that California’s assisted suicide law is a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, and the equal protection and substantive due process clauses of the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
No state in America criminalizes someone killing themselves, but they do criminalize someone assisting another to take their own life, except in states that have legalized assisted suicide and carved some people out of this protection. In those places, there is a two-tiered system of law and medicine, where a medical professional would be subject to civil and professional liability if they did not provide non-disabled people or people with non-life-threatening disabilities suicide prevention, according to the standard of care, if those people expressed a desire to harm or kill themselves in a medical setting. If those same professionals actually helped the person kill themselves by providing the means, i.e., a prescription for a lethal dose of drugs, that medical professional would also be criminally liable under manslaughter statutes for helping another person die by suicide.
People with life-threatening disabilities, however, are not afforded the same criminal, civil, and professional liability protections as everyone else where assisted suicide is on the books. When they get suicide assistance on the basis of their disability, namely the condition that is given a 6-month or less prognosis, this is treating members of a protected class in a different way than everyone else, thereby violating the anti-discrimination law that protects the civil rights and inherent equal human dignity of people with disabilities.
California’s assisted suicide law, the so-called ‘End of Life Options Act,’ must be struck down as unlawful discrimination in violation of the ADA. Please sign the petition and share it to help fight this discriminatory law.
These laws allowing someone to be put into a room and left to die like what happened to that black man in Texas MUST be ended.