Assisted Suicide Litigation To Be Filed in New York

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The news came in through Twitter today (h/t to Stephen Mendelsohn of Second Thoughts CT) that there will be a press conference tomorrow announcing that End of Life Choices of New York is filing an assisted suicide lawsuit.  One tweet says it involves three patients and three doctors.

We don’t have more details yet, but the case may resemble similar cases brought in Montana, Connecticut and New Mexico.  The results of those cases have not been all they have been cracked up to be, contrary to the exaggerated claims coming from assisted suicide advocates.

For example, assisted suicide proponents often claim that Montana legalized assisted suicide, but actually the state Supreme Court merely said that the consent of the victim could be raised by a doctor as a defense in a homicide prosecution.  This is not the kind of blanket immunity that the Oregon assisted suicide statute confers, and so it does not really constitute legalization.

The Connecticut court dismissed the case brought in that state, as previously discussed in our blog:

[T]he Connecticut court viewed this as more appropriate for legislative than judicial action, stating:

Legislative determination is particularly important given the significant medical legal and ethical concerns about legalized physician assisted suicide that have been raised across the country. Among the other difficult and important public policy concerns that the legislature would have to evaluate – and is uniquely positioned in our system of government to evaluate – are the following:

–           Whether physician-assisted suicide threatens the most vulnerable in society, including the poor, the elderly, and the disabled, who are at risk of being threatened, coerced, or influenced to end their lives to spare their families the financial costs and emotional strain of caring for them; …

–           Whether physician-assisted suicide shifts the focus of physicians and insurers away from vitally important measures such as identifying and treating depression and providing end-of-life pain control and palliative care; . . .
–           Whether physician-assisted suicide undermines the physician-patient relationship and the integrity of the medical profession by eroding patient trust in the doctor’s role as healer;…

–           Whether physician-assisted suicide opens the door to the possibility of involuntary euthanasia, as has occurred in the Netherlands, because “what is couched as a limited right to ‘physician-assisted suicide’ is likely, in effect, a much broader license which could prove extremely difficult to police and contain,” Washington v. Glucksberg, 521 U.S. 702, 733 (1997). (Blick Decision on Motion to Dismiss.)

The New Mexico ruling affected one judicial district and is currently on appeal.  A substantial number of national disability rights organizations filed a friend of the court brief in that matter last summer.

Interested members of the press should contact our spokespeople for further reactions to the New York case as details emerge.

NDY Joins Autistic Self Advocacy Network, ADAPT and NCIL in Annual Day of Mourning

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To any media observer, a disproportionate number of people with disabilities who have been killed by their parents have autism.  Therefore, it’s not surprising that the Autistic Self Advocacy Network (ASAN) has led the way for all of us in publicly mourning these horrific tragedies.

The following message is from ASAN:

In the past five years, over seventy people with disabilities have been murdered by their parents.

These acts are horrific enough on their own. But they exist in the context of a larger pattern. A parent kills their disabled child. The media portrays these murders as justifiable and inevitable due to the “burden” of having a disabled person in the family. If the parent stands trial, they are given sympathy and  comparatively lighter sentences, if they are sentenced at all. The victim is disregarded, blamed for their own murder at the hands of the person they should have been able to trust the most, and ultimately forgotten. And then the cycle repeats.

For the last four years, ASAN, ADAPT, Not Dead Yet, the National Council on Independent Living, the Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund, and other disability rights organizations have come together at local vigils across the country to mourn those losses, bring awareness to these tragedies, and demand justice and equal protection under the law for all people with disabilities.

On March 1st, we will come together again, and we ask you to join us.

To join the Day of Mourning on March 1st, please go to the ASAN site and contact the coordinator listed for your city.  If your city does not yet have a coordinator, please consider taking the lead in making it happen, or notify your local NDY, ADAPT or CIL organizations that you would like to help make it happen in your city.  ASAN has even provided a Toolkit to all of us who sign up to help get our message out to the public.

BTW, I’ll confess that we here in upstate New York do not hold our March 1st event in the great outdoors.  It would be too cold, even dangerous for some of our participants.  Do what works for your community.  But please join in honoring the lives of people with disabilities cut short by murder, raise a call to conscience and demand the equal protection of the law.

Clickhole: Terminally Ill Woman Chooses Dignified Death/Eaten by Wolves (satire)

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Clickhole is part of The Onion and parodies sites that post items that go viral. Today, Clickhole featured a “story” obviously inspired by the viral story of Brittany Maynard, who, along with a great deal of technical assistance from Compassion and Choices, shared her wish to kill herself using Oregon’s assisted suicide law. Part of her pitch was to demand that all 50 states in the USA legalize assisted suicide.  Below is one of the photos from today’s story – and an excerpt.  It’s Friday, we needed a laugh, and we were gifted with this:

Meet The Terminally Ill Woman Who Is Choosing To End Her Life With Dignity, At The Snapping Jaws Of 20 Hungry Wolves

 

 

Henrietta Green is brave. In fact, the only thing the 61-year-old from Yarmouth, ME fears is dying without dignity. That’s why, when doctors diagnosed her with leukemia two months ago, she made a decision: She would not die slowly and pathetically in a hospital bed. She would go out proudly, being torn apart and eaten by wolves.

Henrietta’s family supports her choice. Her son Charles is even helping her enact her plan.

***

Right-to-die activists all over the country have released statements of support for Henrietta and others like her, including Alan Davis, 92, who passed away being peacefully drowned by a killer whale at Sea World, and Mark Jenkins, 87, who, surrounded by loved ones, pulled a gun on a group of police officers.

If you are sickeningly familiar with the repetetive format of articles using an individual to pitch a change in public policy. The only part of the Maynard story not included here is the “pretty white girl” aspect of the viral story. It’s a well-known phenomenon that stories about *any* tragedy get more attention if the victims are young, pretty and white – attention from the press and the public.  Older, nonattractive (by white male-dominated standards) don’t get the kind of viral attention Maynard got and continues to get after her death.

Please read the rest of this great parody here.

DREDF’s Marilyn Golden Speaks Out Against CA Assisted Suicide Bill Introduced Today

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An bill to legalize assisted suicide is being introduced in California today.  Fortunately, Marilyn Golden, Senior Policy Analyst for the Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund, is already working to ensure that the disability rights opposition to this bill is being heard.

The Los Angeles Times published an article in advance of the bill introduction, and included quotes and paraphrases from Marilyn:

And some disability rights advocates are vehemently opposed. Marilyn Golden, senior policy analyst with the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, warns that heirs and caregivers would have opportunities for abuse, and that legislative safeguards for people suffering from depression and other mental disorders are hollow.

Golden also told me the marriage of a profit-driven healthcare system and legalized aid in dying sets up dangerous possibilities. She warned of a scenario in which insurers might deny or delay life-sustaining treatments and a patient “is steered toward assisted suicide.”

The inclusion of Marilyn Golden and DREDF is important and obviously columnist Steven Lopez is well aware of the opposition of disability groups. Yet, two days ago, the LA Times Editorial board issued their support for legalization and failed to mention – or chose to omit – any reference to disability groups. This is what the editorial had to say about opponents of assisted suicide:  “The Roman Catholic Church and other groups will almost certainly have strong objections to such a law, but their moral codes should not be imposed on those with different beliefs.”  But Marilyn was clearly not talking about “moral codes” and “beliefs.”

The former  attorney for the bill’s proponents, Kathryn Tucker, was also quoted in the article, stating misleadingly that:

. . . there’s actually “strong support for expanding end-of-life choices” among many people with disabilities.

Neither she nor the reporter mention that all of the major national disability organizations that have taken a position on the issue oppose legalizing assisted suicide.  Her further comment is equally misleading or, more accurately, outright false.

“We now have a great abundance of data from Oregon and Washington that makes clear there is no harm to persons with disabilities when aid in dying is available,” Tucker said.

The Oregon data, limited though it is, shows serious harm to people with disabilities in at least two ways:

  • Every year, people who are not terminal, who outlive a terminal prognosis but are both seriously ill and (in virtually all cases) disabled, receive lethal prescriptions (the data conceals how many, but hospice data tells us that 15% of people outlive a 6-month terminal prognosis); and
  • The top five reasons that people request assisted suicide are related to disability, not being terminal, showing both that they are disabled and that their disability related concerns that could be addressed are not being addressed.

Two of those reasons are feelings of “loss of autonomy” and “being a burden” on family and loved ones.  Earlier today, I found myself explaining to a lobby group something very familiar to those of us who use consumer directed home care services, like myself.  The disability rights movement is in a decades long fight for these services, step by incremental step in state after state, led by ADAPT, and supported by federal policy initiatives and the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Olmstead.

But how many people know about these services and how to access them?  Assisted suicide laws don’t require any disclosure of these consumer directed home care options for addressing the reasons people want assisted suicide, much less requiring that these services are provided to those who need them.  That would be a form of suicide prevention that could really make a difference.  Instead, assisted suicide laws effectively say, who cares, just throw them under the bus.

There’s another key danger that Marilyn Golden obviously pointed to, based on the brief snippet the LA Times reporter included, saying that she “warns that heirs and caregivers would have opportunities for abuse.”  The Oregon assisted suicide law does not require an independent witness at the death.  Most who die under the Oregon law are age 65-84, in a society where one in ten elders are abused according to federal figures.  The abusers are usually family members.  About half the people reported to use assisted suicide in Oregon did not have a health provider present at the time of death.  With no independent witness required, there is no evidence that they self-administered the lethal drugs, or even that they consented at the time of death.

These policy proposals have to be considered in light of the sad reality that not all seriously ill people have loving family.  These laws grant blanket immunity and effectively foreclose investigation of wrongdoing.  As one elder law attorney, Margaret Dore, put it, they are a “recipe for abuse.”

NDY advocates will be working with DREDF and Californians Against Assisted Suicide to defeat this bill, and any similar bills that may be introduced in any state in the U.S.  As Marilyn so effectively summarizes, “If this bill passes, some people’s lives will be ended without their consent, through mistakes and abuse. No safeguards have ever been enacted or proposed that can prevent this outcome, which can never be undone.”

NDY Is Not Working in Coalition with the Family Research Council – And Here’s Why

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On January 12, last Monday, the Executive Director of the National Council on Independent Living emailed me that he would not be able to attend a gathering of a new coalition to oppose assisted suicide bills to be held on Jan. 21st at the offices of the Family Research Council.  The announcement said that disability advocates were involved, so naturally he figured that included Not Dead Yet.  It was complete news to me and I did not receive an invitation. But later that day, I learned that Second Thoughts Director John Kelly, who is also NDY’s New England Regional Director in Boston, received one, as did Marilyn Golden of the Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund in California.

John, Marilyn and I do work in coalition with other groups on the assisted suicide issue, mainly by participating in conference calls to share useful information with groups that we tend to disagree with on other issues.  I’m stating that mildly.  We’ve had a lot of practice, them and us, leaving our disagreements at the door.  We agree that legalizing assisted suicide is extremely dangerous public policy for old, ill and disabled people, including the general public in ways people often don’t recognize.

But this invitation from the Family Research Council (FRC) is different.  There was no advance contact with the most active disability groups on the issue.  In contrast, new coalitions were already forming in Maryland, Pennsylvania and Colorado, but those groups came together through careful outreach, preparation and mutually agreed ground rules.  Face to face meetings, if any, should be held in a neutral setting such as a hotel.  None of this happened with FRC, yet our disability rights colleagues who received this invitation would have no way of knowing that.

DREDF and NDY decided that we needed to communicate our concerns to those we knew who had received an invitation:

We have heard from a few folks in the disability community who have received the invitation below from the Family Research Council (FRC).  FRC did not engage in any preliminary planning with NDY or DREDF, nor even notify us of this effort.  Sending the message from FRC and holding the proposed meeting at FRC’s offices indicates a serious failure to recognize how it undermines the real coalitions that already exist or are forming, and threatens to paint opposition to assisted suicide laws as connected with the other policy positions that FRC is known for.  We hope that disability advocates will not RSVP and will instead put energy into the genuine broad-based coalitions that are working to oppose assisted suicide bills in the states where they are being introduced. We would be glad to help you connect with them.

I received a grateful response from the head of a national disability rights organization, stating that FRC was “a bridge too far” for them.  Then on Friday evening, Jan. 16, I received a forward and query from that same leader, asking if John Kelly was speaking at this gathering?  John was listed in the agenda that had been sent out that evening to invitees:

2:10-2:30         Disability Rights and the Case Against Assisted Suicide- John Kelly (TBD-Skype) (Second Thoughts MA and New England Regional Director, Not Dead Yet)

An asterisk appeared beside the names of seven confirmed speakers, and there was no asterisk by John’s name or one other listed speaker.   Later Friday evening, John received a call from one of the confirmed speakers, inviting him to speak at the gathering via Skype.  Needless to say, John declined, and notified the individual who sent the invitations to remove his name from the agenda and send out the correction.

FRC’s behavior is a good example of bad coalition work.  It’s so bad on so many levels that I felt the need to share this information publicly with other disability rights advocates who may have received an invitation from FRC.  I also want to be clear with other groups that oppose legalization of assisted suicide that perhaps the best way to initiate communication and coordination with the disability rights community to help form a coalition in your state is to contact NDY or DREDF and let us help initiate those connections.

BTW, one reason that I’m particularly concerned about FRC’s approach is the false message that Compassion and Choices (C&C) is giving the media about their opposition.  It’s been a few years since reporters have seriously questioned the existence of disability rights opposition to legalizing assisted suicide.  Every major national disability group that has taken a position on assisted suicide opposes these laws due to the dangers of mistake, coercion and abuse.  But C&C is out there claiming that their only real opposition comes from the religious right, and promoting opinion pieces from two disabled individuals who agree with them.  One reporter even pressed upon one of NDY’s LGBT Board members that she must be a closet conservative.  Enough already.

Disability organizations, like policy makers, have a duty to consider the risks that proposed laws pose to everyone, not just a few.  Collectively, disability rights advocates have first hand experience with medical mistakes, medical devaluation of our lives, daily violation of our existing legal rights, social stigma and oppression, crushing financial pressures, and abuse at two to four times the rate of non-disabled peers.  All of these mean that we cannot sit by silently while assisted suicide bills are falsely marketed as a progressive social cause.  We’re willing to work with medical, palliative care, hospice, religious and pro-life organizations in broad coalition to defeat these bills, but coalition presumes equity, good faith and an ability for all members to keep their eyes on the prize.  Sadly, we don’t see that in FRC.