Second Thoughts” Abound at Assisted Suicide Hearing – Part 2

Part 1 of this blog introduced the Massachusetts Statehouse hearing held on December 17 about legalizing assisted suicide.  The Joint Committee on Public Health heard testimony on Bill H 1998, introduced as always by Democrat Representative Louis Kafka of Stoughton.

Geriatric social worker and peer advocate Cassie Cramer drove home the point that it is social oppression that causes people distress, that the answer is social supports, not suicide.  Cassie said:

I’d like to imagine that the choice to end one’s life would be made without any influence of guilt over the cost of care, hopelessness due to failure of systems of care, or loss of self-esteem due to living in a society that values youth, productivity and independence.  But, this is not the world we live in.  My experience as a geriatric social worker parallels physician Ira Byock’s observations, that “much suffering of people with advanced illness is preventable and the indignities are imposed.”        

Second Thoughts Connecticut leader Cathy Ludlum defended the rights of disabled people to stay alive:

Once someone has a disability, there will likely be times where problems arise and survival is not assured.  Add to that the very strong cultural assumption that death is preferable to life with a disability, and you have a recipe for disaster.  Most of us have stories about how doctors treat us differently from our nondisabled counterparts, asking us if aggressive treatment is really what we want or need.  For us, physician assisted suicide looks like a new way to die from our practitioners’ unconscious biases.

Stephen Mendelsohn of Second Thoughts Connecticut proclaimed our intimate social connections by quoting John Donne’s famous line that “no man is an island; any man’s death diminishes me.” Riffing on the primitive individualism of the proponents, Stephen said:

“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. 

Stephen recounted the story of a severely disabled man, a very happy man with a rich work and family life, being asked by a 16-year-old girl, “If it’s okay to shorten the life of someone because of their suffering—well, I’m also suffering, and I’d rather die than live.”

Ruthie Poole, President of the Board of MPOWER, a statewide membership organization made up of people with lived experience of mental health diagnoses, spoke to the limitations of personal autonomy in the presence of severe depression.  Ruthie said:

Absolute hopelessness and seeing no way out are common feelings for those of us who have experienced severe depression. Personally, as someone who has been suicidal in the past, I can relate to the desire for “a painless and easy way out.”  However, depression is treatable and reversible. Suicide is not.

MPOWER joined ASAN in making public statements against legalization.

Allegra Stout, Community Organizer with the Boston Center for Independent Living (BCIL) reiterated its position taken last year against assisted suicide.

Bill Peace, board member of Not Dead Yet, was signed up ahead of time for the first panel, but got inexplicably passed over.  Adding to an oppressive string of inaccessible experiences, Bill got overheated by the hot hearing room air.  Only after he insisted was he called to testify.

Bill recounted his hellish experience in a hospital of being approached at midnight by a strange doctor.  Bill was ill but fully expected to recover from a serious skin ulcer when a man appeared at his hospital bedside inquiring whether Bill understood the gravity of his condition.

He grimly told me I would be bedbound for at least six months and most likely a year or more. That there was a good chance the wound would never heal. If this happened, I would never sit in my wheelchair. I would never be able to work again. Not close to done, he told me I was looking at a life of complete and utter dependence. My medical expenses would be staggering. Bankruptcy was not just possible but likely. Insurance would stop covering wound care well before I was healed. Most people with the type of wound I had ended up in a nursing home.

The doctor urged Bill to die.  It is hard to describe the feeling of betrayal, when you realize that the professional into whose care you have been placed believes that you would be better off dead and should die.

It took Bill years to write his story, but when the Hastings Center Report published it, his honesty induced an outpouring of similar stories.  Once again, we realize how powerful our own stories are, how political the personal actually is.

Barely had Bill Peace finished when news swept through the room that the Statehouse was about to close, as a second batch of snow was falling. So with about 20 assisted suicide supporters waiting to speak, Chair Jeffrey Sanchez gaveled the hearing to a close and ordered everyone out.

Like bookends, disability discrimination framed the meeting.  What began with the exclusion of people impacted by the bill under consideration was brought to a close by the prerogatives of those who are able to travel by car. When people have to stay indoors for sake of their physical safety, the exclusion does not seem to bother our elites.  But when their cars might be slowed down, everyone go home.

Statehouse reporter Christine Lee for WWLP-22NewsSpringfield did a story on the hearing, and briefly interviewed me.   She grabbed one quote:

But bill opponents fear the law could be abused to coerce the disabled and elderly into dying.

“What people should be doing instead of searching for suicide as an answer is making sure that good palliative care and early enough hospice is available to everyone,” John Kelley (sic), director of Second Choices Mass.

There is more testimony!  Because of the snow, some people could not make it to testify.  Here is the NDY press release that links to a collection of testimony, including Eileen Feldman’s and Dusya Lyubovskaya’s who could not attend in person, along with a letter I sent to a local disability rights group. – John Kelly