…while and enjoyable things, and should not be written off. How Assisted Suicide Laws Endanger People Like Me As a severely disabled person who depends on life-sustaining treatment, I would be able to qualify for assisted suicide at any time if I lived where assisted suicide is legal. If I became despondent, for example if I lost my husband or my job, and decided that I wanted to die, I would not be treated the same as a nondisabled and healthy per…

…ty life. In fact, there are times, as this report will describe where physicians recommend and family or other surrogate decision makers decide to not provide a needed transplant, to withhold medical treatment including hydration and nutrition of individuals without a terminal condition, or to sterilize people all on the basis of their disabilities. Applied in these ways, medical decision making and procedures are discriminatory and deny basic con…

…al of Personhood,” Hastings Center Report 42, no. 4, (2012), p. 15 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/229014978_Comfort_Care_as_Denial_of_Personhood “It’s not pain but ‘existential distress’ that leads people to assisted suicide, study suggests”, Washington Post, May 26, 2017 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2017/05/24/its-not-pain-but-existential-distress-that-leads-people-to-assisted-suicide-study-suggests/?utm_term=….

…sabled, ill, and elderly people in living our lives, physician assisted suicide becomes economically coercive. New York has consistently chosen the cheaper option for disabled people at every turn. Assisted suicide offers the cheapest option of them all. As Derek Humphrey pointed out in his conclusion, assisted suicide is a form of “cost containment.” It gives disabled New Yorkers a choice between lives without the supports and services we need or…