Horacio Esparza Speaks About Assisted Suicide & Gives NDY A Gift

In July 2008, Horacio Esparza stepped into his role as executive director of Progress Center for Independent Living in Forest Park, Illinois. (For 12 years, I had served in that same role, during which time I also founded and served as President of Not Dead Yet.)

Horacio has been blind since early childhood. Born in Mexico, by the age of eleven, he convinced his parents to let him go to a school for blind people. Eventually, he immigrated to the U.S., became a citizen, and built a work history that qualified him for his job at Progress Center.

Horacio had first worked for Progress Center as the Independent Living Coordinator, assisting people with all kinds of disabilities to acquire the information and skills they needed to achieve their personal goals. Later, he became the Director of the Center’s South Satellite, which served the suburbs of southern Cook County, where a significant portion of the population is Latino.

In time, Horacio explained something of his feelings about assisted suicide and Not Dead Yet. “Nineteen years ago when my son had a retinal detachment, if an assisted suicide law would have allowed me and my wife to commit suicide, maybe we would have made that choice… Fortunately, I found Progress Center and Not Dead Yet … and that changed our lives. Now we are happy and successful. One thing many people ignore is that we need motivation to live and not motivation to die. People wishing to die is not due to their body pain, it is due to a lack of motivation.”

Proponents of a public policy of assisted suicide argue that motivation to live may be relevant to people with disabilities, not to people with a terminal condition. But Horacio has experienced this issue in his close family.

“Four years ago, my oldest sister (age 74) passed away. She had multiple myeloma and she never mentioned the word ‘dying’. Her myeloma got worst each day and even to the last minute she expressed her desire to live. She was receiving all medical pain relief and counseling.

My sister was motivated because all of us were around her showing our support and showing her how much we needed her.”

His mother who is 95 has also been diagnosed with multiple myeloma. “My mother has been very independent and when her illness stops her from doing things on her own, that’s when she gets depressed,” he says. “She has her own apartment and 24-7 one of her daughters or sons are with her. Even though she is 95, we never put her in a nursing home. And sometimes she tells us, ‘I don’t know why your father doesn’t call me to be with him,’ but that’s when she feels she is giving us a hard time. I think people with terminal illnesses don’t want to die due to their body pain, but when their dignity is touched, when they feel their family members are not living their own lives. Then when we show her how we need her and how much we love her, when we tell her how much she means to us, the depression changes to motivation.”

For several years, Horacio has served on the national Board of Not Dead Yet. Among other contributions to our work, he’s translated into Spanish a summary of the key reasons that assisted suicide laws should be rejected because of the dangers they pose to old, ill and disabled people. Please share the gift of this translation with you family, friends and colleagues in the Latino Community.

Summary Points Against Bills to Legalize Assisted Suicide

• If assisted suicide is legal, some people’s lives will be ended without their consent, through mistakes and abuse. No safeguards have ever been enacted or even proposed that can prevent this outcome, which can never be undone.

• Assisted suicide is too dangerous.

>          Assisted suicide is a recipe for abuse, including elder abuse. Where assisted suicide is legal, an heir or abusive caregiver may steer someone towards assisted suicide, witness the request, pick up the lethal dose, and even give the drug—no witnesses are required at the death, so who would know?

>          Diagnoses of terminal illness are too often wrong, leading people to give up on treatment and lose good years of their lives, and endangering people with disabilities, people with chronic illness, and other people misdiagnosed as terminally ill.

>          People with depression are at significant risk.

>          Once the prescription is filled, there are no safeguards. Why are safeguards missing at the most important point?

• Assisted suicide will become the only option low-income people can afford.

>          The cost of drugs for doctor-prescribed suicide is miniscule compared to the cost of providing treatment to make a patient more comfortable. This economic force of gravity is obvious and has already been experienced under our nation’s oldest assisted-suicide law in Oregon.

>          Not all families are supportive. Some patients will feel that they should request doctor-prescribed suicide so that they wouldn’t be a financial or emotional burden on their family.

>          Many families are under tremendous strain. At a time of rising food costs, home foreclosures and general economic uncertainty, it would be foolhardy to ignore the role that finances would play when making end-of-life decisions.

>          Even in families where there is support for a patient diagnosed with a terminal illness, patients could feel that they are being selfish for not sparing their family. This has been documented in Oregon as a reason for requesting a lethal prescription. According to Oregon’s latest (2016) official report, 40 percent of patients who died using that state’s assisted-suicide law did so to avoid being a burden on their family, friends or caregivers.

• Assisted suicide laws feature virtually no oversight, and data collection is grossly insufficient.

>          There is no investigation of abuse, nor even a way to report it. The states where assisted suicide is legal today do not report abuses and problems.