I am tired of reading stories in the Mirror and elsewhere that minimize or hardly bother to mention the strong opposition to Assisted Suicide legislation that has been successfully spearheaded by Second Thoughts Connecticut and is embraced by many progressives and other disability rights activists. The slick and well-funded marketing campaigns of the Hemlock Society (re-branded Compassion and Choices) have helped to make it appear that the only significant opposition comes from the Catholic Church. Nothing could be further from the truth. As someone who has worked against the death penalty, for reproductive freedom (including abortion rights), against racism and white supremacy, is a supporter of Single Payer health care, and has also had to fight attempts by the existing medical system to withhold life-saving treatment, I for one consider my long-term activism against these dangerous bills a seamless part of my beliefs and actions for human rights.
“My life, my death, my choice,” the slogan of Compassion and Choices, found its way to a sign at a Trump supporters’ super-spreader event last year, which is not surprising, since the implication is that individual behavior has no impact on the lives of others. While it may provide an individual “choice” for a select few, among its many evils, the legalization of Medical Assisted Suicide also opens the door to increased rationing of health care, which is an existential threat to the many.
Anyone who has been victimized by medical practitioners’ judgments about a patient’s “quality of life” or lack thereof coupled with institutional mandates to cut costs and insurance companies’ refusals to pay for life-saving procedures can see how easily this so-called choice can morph into no choice at all for certain categories of people. The COVID crisis has dramatically revealed the ways in which poor, disabled, elderly, black and brown people are already discriminated against within the medical system. It is appalling that our elected officials refuse repeatedly to listen to the lived experience of so many of us but keep bringing up these bills to allow our doctors to kill us year after year after year. And it is long past time that the news media do its job to report on this issue by going beyond the false narrative that proponents try to spin as to who opposes this legislation, and why.
Joan Cavanagh