This is a quick sharing from our “In the News” section of our website, with excerpts from articles that included the disability perspective in the last two days of coverage of the assisted suicide issue spurred by media attention to the Brittany Maynard story. Marilyn Golden, John Kelly and I have also had op-eds published very recently, and links to those have been posted under “Op eds.” I apologize for the lack of analysis of the coverage, but I’m sure that our regular readers are very aware of how one-sided the majority of coverage has been.
Brittany Maynard’s Storybook Ending (Townhall.com, 11/4/14)
Marilyn Golden of the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund fears that Maynard’s storyline will create “suicide contagion” as other young people, even those who are not terminally ill, see her as a model. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, “more than 50 research studies worldwide have found that certain types of news coverage can increase the likelihood of suicide in vulnerable individuals. The magnitude of the increase is related to the amount, duration and prominence of coverage.”
Aid-in-dying local conversation (WHAM Cha. 13, 11/4/14)
“It’s not about people taking their own lives it’s setting up a system where medical providers and everyone involved are guaranteed immunity in assisting someone with suicide, the doctor acts as gate keeper,” said Stephen Drake of the “Not Dead Yet” advocacy group. “That’s kind of dangerous public policy in terms of making that significant difference because the suicide prevention statues are based on the idea lives are valuable.” The group “Not Dead Yet” is a disability rights group who believes aid-in-dying laws discriminate against old, ill and disabled. Drake explains doctors can be wrong and sometimes people who are once called terminal end up living much longer.
Brittany Maynard’s death could spur action on assisted suicide in California (Sacramento Bee, 11/3/14)
“The number of people who are at risk of significant harm (is) so much larger than the people who would be helped,” said Marilyn Golden, a policy analyst for the Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund. “If assisted suicide is legal, some people’s lives will be ended without their consent through mistakes and abuse.”
Offering death as an option would influence not just patients, Golden said, but also doctors and insurance companies who help guide end-of-life decisions.
“There is a deadly mix between our broken profit-driven health system and the option of assisted suicide, which will become the cheapest so-called treatment,” Golden said. “Will insurers do the right thing or the cheap thing?”
More attention to right-to-death debate after Maynard’s death (USA Today, 11/3/14)
At the time of death, the laws don’t require an independent witness to verify it’s the patient who is administering the drugs themselves or not being pressured to take the drugs, said Diane Coleman, president of Not Dead Yet, a disability rights organization that opposes legalizing assisted suicide.
“You don’t really know what’s going on behind closed doors,” Coleman said.
The Future of the Right-to-Die Movement (U.S. News & World Report, 11/3/14)
Marilyn Golden, senior policy analyst at the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, says Maynard’s case may present a compelling argument on an individual level, “but we must look more broadly at society, at all the people who stand to be harmed.”
She says the Oregon law does not do enough to protect vulnerable people from being pressured by abusive care workers, family members or even their insurance companies. Furthermore, she says, diagnoses of how long a patient has to live can be wrong, and there is not enough being done to screen for mental depression or other psychiatric issues.
“When people read the fine print, assisted suicide bills are defeated in legislatures,” she says, noting there are other legal forms of care, known as palliative care, that can relieve the suffering of the terminally ill.