[Ed. Note: For a PDF formatted version of this Press Release, and links to eight testimonies submitted by NDY Board member William Peace as well as members of Second Thoughts Massachusetts and Second Thoughts Connecticut, go here.]
Disability rights activists from across the region will be speaking Tuesday before the Massachusetts legislature’s Joint Committee on Public Health in opposition to H 1998, which would legalize assisted suicide in the state. The group called Second Thoughts was instrumental last year in the defeat of the assisted suicide referendum, Question 2. The hearing begins at 10:00 AM in Room A-1 at the State House.
Second Thoughts director John Kelly said, “This dangerous bill enables a doctor to misdiagnose you as terminal, decide that your depression doesn’t impair your judgment, and give you a prescription on the same day.”
Ruthie Poole, Board President of member organization MPOWER, said “As someone who has suffered from major depression in the past, I can relate to the desire for ‘an easy way out.’ Depression is treatable and reversible. Suicide is not. I look forward to testifying against H 1998.”
William Peace, the Jeanette K Watson Distinguished Visiting Professor at Syracuse University, is driving from New York to talk about the time the doctor in a hospital tried to convince him to choose death over treating a dangerous infection. “I was not in any way terminally ill. Yet a physician I had never met deemed my life not worth living. Disability in this physician’s opinion was a fate worse than death.”
Second Thoughts member Karen Schneiderman said that “Abuse of older and disabled people is already a problem. With no safeguards and no waiting period, people’s lives will be endangered.”
Cassie Cramer, a geriatric social worker with experience working in Protective Services, plans to submit written testimony stating “that elder abuse, caregiver neglect or financial exploitation is widespread and that the wrong-doing is typically not glaring or easily identifiable by providers.”
Kelly, who is also the New England regional director for Not Dead Yet, a national disability group, emphasized that, under current law, people have the right to refuse or stop medical treatment, including food and water. People also have the right to adequate pain relief, even to the point of sedation if necessary. “What’s clear from Oregon is that pain is not the issue – prescribing doctors report patient concerns are psychological and social factors like physical dependence on others, feeling like a burden,” Kelly said. “Those are disability issues and we have a problem with using these concerns to justify state supported suicide.”
Hopefully, these excellent comments will open the eyes of the legislators to the particular danger of assisted suicide to the disabled and the elderly.
While current laws purport to protect the elderly/disabled patients from unilateral shortening of life by physicians/hospitals because of “quality of life concerns” the “fiscal futility” concerns of physicians/hospitals now produces disparate discrimination when hospitals are not reimbursed under existing Medicare reimbursement protocols for non beneficial over treatment, mistakes, errors, exceeding the DRG Caps, and the complications thereof.
Of course, the disabled and the elderly are more likely to suffer complications and to be over treated or under treated under existing practices and to exceed DRG Caps. The Hospitals respond by inappropriately (and illegally) extrapolating DNR Code Status into the medical charts of the elderly/disabled in order to limit treatments that they KNOW will not be reimbursed by Medicare and the private insurers.
The danger to the disabled and to the elderly must not be underestimated and should be investigated.
BS”D
In addition to snapping pictures of John Kelly testifying and of Cathy Ludlum waiting to do so, I brought the “Got Second Thoughts?” stickers that worked so well for us in Connecticut. C&C outnumbered us with their green “my life my choice my death” stickers. My out-of-the-box testimony (the full version is attached to the press release, with citations) ripped right into their slogan:
Proponents of this bill say that it is about “compassion” and “choice.” It is about choice all right—a stark choice about what kind of society we wish to live in. Their slogan, “My Life, My Death, My Choice” reflects Ayn Rand’s trinity of me, myself, and I. In a Social Darwinist world that’s all about me, there is no room for the interdependence that is an important facet of the lives of successful people with disabilities. People in Oregon and Washington are killing themselves not because of pain, but because of fear of disability, because they view needing assistance with eating or toileting as a “loss of autonomy,” a “loss of dignity,” and a “burden” on others In Rand’s worldview, in books like Atlas Shrugged and The Virtue of Selfishness, those who depend on assistance from others are demeaned as “moochers.” John Galt, the hero of Atlas Shrugged, takes an oath, stating, “I swear by my life and love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.” Rand opposed what she called “kneeling buses” and helping “subnormal” children. Her contempt for people with disabilities continues to infest our politics to this day.
…
“My Life. My Death. My Choice.” What does that message, plastered on billboards and worn on stickers, send to an autistic or LGBT teenager who is being mercilessly bullied? When you give a societal go-ahead for suicide under the Orwellian term “compassionate aid-in-dying,” it becomes contagious, especially in a society obsessed with me, myself, and I. Whatever happened to John Donne’s view that “no man is an island; any man’s death diminishes me”?
A widely known cross-cultural allegory speaks of disability and interdependence and how we can make our lives into heaven or hell. I am Jewish; the version I am familiar with is attributed to Ḥaim of Romshishok. In this allegory, everyone has a disability; everyone’s arms are locked straight out and no one can bend their elbows. In both hell and heaven, there are banquets of sumptuous food. In hell, everyone is self-centered and starves. In heaven, everyone feeds each other. Heaven and hell are metaphors for our world and what we make of it.