[Editor’s Note: Mea Culpa, we meant to post a blog on this as soon as we got the video captioned, and it’s been posted in our “In the News” section, but catching up belatedly here in the blog. . .]
In this in-depth interview, Not Dead Yet’s New England regional director John Kelly critiques the pro-assisted suicide message of the film “Me Before You.” The film is part of an ongoing trend of Hollywood movies, John tells host Chris Lovett of Boston Neighborhood Network News, produced “to confirm people’s beliefs that our lives are not worth living.” The segment includes the suicide prevention public service announcement targeting disabled people created by the Center for Disability Rights in Rochester New York. John also comments on the assisted suicide bill recently defeated in the Massachusetts legislature.
Chris asks John about Will’s suicide, that isn’t “this is a case where somebody makes a certain choice and I guess, you know, couldn’t people make a choice like that and just do a film about it?” John redirects the question to the “choice” made by author Jojo Moyes to construct a fictional character in order to promote suicide for disabled people:
Well, the choice is the author’s choice, Jojo Moyes, who both wrote the book and wrote the screenplay for the movie. And she said that when she wrote the book, “quality of life was very high in my mind, I had two relatives who required 24-hour care just to stay alive. I think if you deal with that situation on any kind of lengthy basis, you can’t help but ask yourself questions about how somebody lives and what kind of quality of life you can offer someone. At what point does the quality become meaningless and at what point do you give someone the right to decide for themselves?” So she’s a bigot and she wanted to write a book, and unfortunately for us, millions of people bought the book and are now seeing the movie. We never see the opposite side of the picture, and she admitted that she didn’t speak to any quadriplegics before writing the movie. It’s a cartoon caricature in which a wealthy man who has everything going for him – including a woman who is beautiful, with whom he’s mutually in love – and yet he still decides to kill himself.