…ily gathered around the peaceful and willing suicide. The House Health & Human Development Committee should not be recommending the introduction of poisonous drugs into abusive situations and then not even require that an independent, disinterested witness be present at the dying. This bill takes no notice of how self-interest can motivate family members and caregivers. Because assisted suicide bills do not grant state departments of public heal…
…capable victims, or as inspirational over-achievers, but never as ordinary human beings. Nor do the filmmakers focus on their struggles against the external barriers and discrimination that limit their life options, focusing instead on the physical changes that are natural to the human experience. The message is clear; the lives of those of us with disabilities are not worth living. We are better off dead, and the sooner the better. These attitude…
…le that the legal and judicial systems have in ensuring that the civil and human rights of individuals with disabilities are protected regardless of their severity and in contrast to opinions regularly expressed in the medical and ethics community. Finally, the report presents a series of recommendations for how the legal and medical systems at a local, state and national level, including protection and advocacy agencies, ethics committees, instit…
…research. As a corollary, the advocated practice wold minimize inadvertent human pain and suffering in the conduct of experimental clinical trials of new drugs, devices, or procedures by serving as an intermediate buffer stage between those trials and the first probing experiments on laboratory animals. Finally, taken together, these advantages not only represent a substantial easing of the strain on research budgets; but much more importantly, th…
…g resistance after initial success was due to our role as agents of deconstruction. Deconstruction serves our interests as a community, since the current paradigm doesn’t allow for our part in the debates over assisted suicide and euthanasia at all – unless it’s an individual disabled person asking to be killed. What do you think the word collaboration should mean? You talk about collaboration as an overlap of concerns. But you hint that this coll…
