Over the weekend, a letter opposing the Falconer bill was circulated among disability advocates/activists in the US and the UK. Diane Coleman and I both signed on to the letter on behalf of NDY. But the majority of the endorsers are disability advocates and activists from the UK.
The letter was submitted to a couple of newspapers in the UK, but was never published. It did get circulated by other means, though, and was probably seen by people who needed to read it.
The letter is up now – on Crippen’s blog. Dave Lupton is a disability activist and a funny and talented cartoonist, whose works are posted on his blog. Best of all, Dave takes accessibility seriously – all of his cartoons are provided with alternate format rich text descriptions of their content. Dave’s blog is just one of several hosted on the site “Disability Arts Online,” which is a site well worth checking out to find out what the more artistically talented members of our community are doing.
As mentioned at the top of this post, Dave Lupton has posted the Open Letter on his own blog and is titled “Final Solution.”
Here is an excerpt:
As leaders of the disabled people’s movement in the UK and the USA, we are extremely concerned about how the proposed amendment to the Coroners and Justice Bill will impact onthe lives of disabled people.
If Lord Falconer’s amendment succeeds in the House of Lords on Tuesday 7 July then those who assist ‘terminally ill’ people to go abroad to end their lives in ‘suicide clinics’ would be immune from prosecution.
The phrase ‘terminally ill’ is not defined in the amendment, and could apply to people with a very wide range of chronic progressive illnesses some with life expectancy stretching to decades. Disabled people who experience progressive conditions understand far more than non-disabled people about what it is live with these pressures. We know what is acceptable as disease or disability progresses, and for the huge number of us who say no to assisted suicide, it is because we fear the changing culture such an amendment would bring. People without experience of disability, including our friends and families cannot predict what each stage of our personal journey will mean. Furthermore, financial and emotional conflicts of interest will always present an added burden to the situation. A law decriminalising assisted suicide would undoubtedly place disabled people under pressure to end their lives early to relieve the burden on relatives, carers or the state.
Read the rest, with the list of endorsers, at Crippen’s Blog. –Stephen Drake