I can’t explain the feelings that go through me when Robert Latimer surfaces in the news again. Robert Latimer’s murder of his daughter Tracy was pivotal in getting my attention directed at the euthanasia movement and in providing a solid foundation for my opposition to the movement.
Even though it looks like I haven’t written anything here on the blog about Tracy Latimer’s murder, the role the public debate about her murder played in my turn to activism has long been a part of my official bio:
During his years at Syracuse, one key event turned his interests and passions toward assisted suicide and euthanasia. In the early 1990s, Robert Latimer, a Canadian farmer who murdered his disabled daughter, Tracy, became a “poster child” for the Canadian pro-assisted suicide groups. Tracy Latimer was not dying and she did not ask to die. In 1996, while growing increasingly alarmed over the “better dead than disabled” rhetoric of the pro-euthanasia movement, he learned of the formation of Not Dead Yet and dropped everything to join its first protest action.
How far did the euthanasia activists in Canada go in embracing the killer of a nonterminally ill child who never asked to die? What did the champions of autonomy have to say?
Here’s one example from a Canadian “right to die” leader, quoted in a 1994 NY Times article on Robert Latimer. She is reacting to the imposition of a 10-year prison sentence:
Marilynne Seguin, executive director of Dying With Dignity, a Toronto-based group promoting freedom of choice for physician-assisted deaths, said that the Latimers had already lived under a sentence during the 12 years that Tracy was alive and that to add the 10-year punishment “is quite unconscionable.”
It’s not often that people you didn’t know were your enemies declare themselves so openly. When Seguin equated parenting Tracy Latimer to being under a prison sentence, it also meant that her murder was a release – but not for Tracy. By her reckoning, it was Robert Latimer who engineered his own “release.”
Alex Schadenberg has posted about the latest round in news coverage – which revolves around efforts to get Latimer’s parole conditions loosened. I recommend reading Alex’s post on the subject.
No disrespect to Alex, but in all honesty, I found a blogger who has written two posts on this latest round of press coverage that seems to touch every single element in the complex mix churning in my own stomach every time Robert Latimer is in the news again.
On August 19, Trouble posted a blog entry titled “This post is about Tracy Latimer’s Murderer“:
OH YAY! Gentle reader, I’m here to inform you that once again Tracy Latimer’s murderer is in the news, which means we can deal with another week or two or months or years of people wibbling on about how Tracy Latimer’s murderer is such a sweet innocent man who only murdered his disabled daughter because Tracy wasn’t really a person and deserved to be murdered, and how he’s such a victim of the system, and woe is poor him, and how cripples really DO have no life and it’s totally okay for people to murder disabled children, as long as they don’t have a disability and murder their own non-disabled children. Those people are menaces and should be locked up forever!!!!!!!!!!!
That was just for beginners.
She followed up with the post “it has begun“:
I’m sure this weekend and into next week will be full of these shit-tastic stories, and I’m going to spend the whole damned week in a state of rage, and people will tell me to calm down because, you know, it’s okay, it’s just some 12 year old girl whose been dead since 1993.
She also left a comment in that section on the second post that accurately describes how Tracy Latimer is treated in stories about her own murder. And it’s a treatment that I’ve seen repeated in countless stories involving the murders of both adults and children with disabilities:
It’s also something it’s really hard to talk about. I try to blog about it calmly and rationally and then I remember that these people think that Tracy should be a footnote in her own murder, and I lose it.
I confess to having many of these same thoughts and feelings churning inside on a regular basis. Some days, it can be very difficult to write “calmly and rationally.”
Please read both of Trouble’s posts on Tracy Latimer’s murder. I only shared a small excerpt and her posts should be read in their entirety. First go here and then here. –Stephen Drake
Let passion ring – the hell with writing “calmly” and “rationally” about the murder of a child…
unless you feel you have to. I’d like to be able to scream on paper in words, for all the Tracy Latimers and for all of us. If not us, who will? (No doubt, doing “calm” version for background/research presentation is good. ) This last piece of my comment reminds me that once again, the key is about choice, choosing. Autonomy and choice is what we are fighting for…it comes in to every aspect of living as a person with disability/disabilities –
whether or not we, each of us as a disabled person has a choice of how we wish to live. Once again, it highlights for me how CHOICE is what disabled people have removed from our lives and what we are fighting for.
This blog entry motivated me to read the Wikipedia article about Tracy and Robert Latimer. I find Wikipedia to be an excellent resource for becoming familiar with these types of stories.
Robert Latimer is definitely deserving of contempt. What many people do not realize is that Latimer IS a *present* danger to society. While it is unlikely that he will directly kill a disabled person again, his public advocacy and refusal to recognize the harm of his actions (read about his public statements pertaining to his parole) makes it much more likely that other disabled persons will be killed. Like Jack Kevorkian, his incarceration is a very necessary and vital part of the protection of the vulnerable.
We lost our dear relative to euthanasia done by the medical staff. Life feels unreal now.She was put into a vegetative coma by narcotics.Then she was labeled as dying from dementia.
The staff knew she was in a vegetative state from the drugs but they would never admit that. I have always thought of the medical staff as being there to help with any kind of medical problem. I never in a million years would have thought that they would commit the crime of euthanasia until it happened in our own family. Euthanasia not only steals the life of a loved one it destroys the family.