Disability Activists in the UK Push Back Against BBC and Terry Pratchett Promotion of Assisted Suicide

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Our disabled allies in the UK are currently experiencing – and fighting against – a potentially deadly assault on their lives and freedom.  The UK Government proposes to severely cut the many parts of the social safety net that disabled people of all ages depend on to live – and many just barely managing on current supports.  At the same time, the pro-euthanasia campaign seems to be increasing in power – both politically and in the media.

It sounds a little like the United States, doesn’t it?

Truthfully, people in the US who are old, ill, poor and/or disabled haven’t gotten to feel the full brunt of the budget axe yet, but we can see it coming.  I reckon we’re a year or two at most until we’re really facing the realities of what are now merely threats (for the most part).  And – especially after the non-stop eulogizing of Kevorkian over the past couple of weeks, we can certainly feel the sentiment in terms of legalized euthanasia and assisted suicide gaining ground.  And it looks like there are more people who are willing to admit that they’re not just talking about the “terminally ill.”  They even get kindly clueless Dr. Sanjay Gupta to give them the opportunity to proselytize to a national audience.

No two countries are alike, but nevertheless we should take what lessons we can from our brothers and sisters in the UK.  They’re fighting battles that may be just as imminent for us within a very short time.

Last night the BBC aired a “documentary” by fantasy writer Terry Pratchett.  Pratchett was diagnosed with a form of demential a couple of years ago.  Since then, he’s used his popularity, wealth and influence to do everything he can to push legalization of assisted suicide and euthanasia forward.  As a rich disabled guy, this self-absorbed a-hole, Pratchett hasn’t, to my knowledge, said one word about the dismantling of the social safety net that other – less wealthy – disabled people are facing.  In this latest BBC show, Pratchett showed a person at Dignitas taking a lethal drink and dying.

Enough from me.

On the blog Disabled People Fight Back, Miss Dennis Queen (aka Clair Lewis) put up two posts today in regard two posts outlining a disability response:

Challenging Pratchett & Designer Deaths: Assisted Suicide is deadly discrimination

Fantasy novelist Terry Pratchett has already written his life’s final chapter. For it to work, we’d need to destroy medical & human rights legislation and principles protecting sick & disabled people and our lives. Not only is this selfish and arrogant, but should he achieve his goal, many lives would be put at risk.

Terry Pratchett wants all sick & disabled people who are suffering to be given access to deathly medications – not all people who wish to end their lives – just us sick ones.  This is a deadly form of discrimination.

Disability rights activists in the Disabled people’s movement such as D.A.N. and Not Dead Yet and the newer UK network of the same name have been fighting the flow of popular opinion on this for a very long time, but our voices are rarely included in the debate. At the very least there should be some balance in the debate.

In his position of privilege, can Terry even know or understand what difficulties most of us face, or why we face them? Is a newly disabled, well off, writer of fiction qualified to make such huge social decisions on our behalf? He is not suffering the neglect so many face, or the pressures to not be a burden. He is out of touch with the struggles of most people with serious impairments and illnesses. How can he know what is right for the rest of us?

Pratchett’s documentary tonight on BBC made a completely one-sided bid to show how wanted and ‘good’ death clinics are, despite it being common medical knowledge that most people in severe health situations want to be supported to live as long as we can.

 Read the rest of the post here.

ACTION NOTICE: Fight BBC bias towards assisted suicide! Just takes 10 minutes 

It’s time to complain to the BBC again and push for balance. Despite more than a year of us poking them, pointing out the one-sidedness of what they choose to air on voluntary euthanasia and assisted suicide, BBC are continuing to advance and weight debate about this life and death issue.  
This influences public opinion and is not a representation of the complex debates going on. People do have a right to choice and part of that is being given access to ALL the information.

Last night’s documentary from Terry Pratchett about assisted suicide contained no detailed balancing view.

Debates afterards on Newsnight were weighted against the sole disability rights activist there (Liz Carr) and one religious representative.

BBC online news last night gave brief overview on this matter:

Ms Carr said: “I and many other disabled older and terminally ill people, are quite fearful of what legalising assisted suicide would do and mean and those arguments aren’t being debated, teased out, the safeguards aren’t being looked at.
“Until we have a programme that does that, then I won’t be happy to move onto this wider debate.”

Read the rest of the post here, which includes a link to a BBC complaint form and a 5-step set of instructions to to ease the process.  

And if you think it’s unfair or paranoid to link the economic crisis to the rise in pro-euthanasia propaganda, I’d advise people to go back and read this post, which highlighted the following quote from Hemlock Society Founder and Final Exit Network advisor Derek Humphry, writing with author Mary Clement in 2000:

“Similar to other social issues, the right-to-die movement has not arisen separate and distinct from other concurrent developments of our time. In attempting to answer the question Why Now?, one must look at the realities of the increasing cost of health care in an aging society, because in the final analysis, economics, not the quest for broadened individual liberties or increased autonomy, will drive assisted suicide to the plateau of acceptable practice. As technology advances, as medical costs skyrocket out of control, as chronic diseases predominate, as the projected rate of the eighty-five-and-older population accelerates, as managed care seeks to cut costs and as Medicare is predicted to go bankrupt by 2007, the impetus of cost containment provide impetus, whether openly acknowledged or not, for the practicalities of an assisted death.” (Emphasis added.)


–Stephen Drake

In Memorium: The Things NDYers Have Said About Kevorkian Over the Years

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First, specific airing of Largest Minority on WBAI mentioned earlier this week is now archived in mp3 format.  You can listen to the show if you missed it and still want to check it out.

Today, a public and private funeral and memorial was held for Jack Kevorkian.  I won’t link to the press coverage – it’s all predictably nauseating.

But I thought it would be appropriate to do a different kind of memorial right here.  In order to appropriately “honor” Kevorkian’s memory, I’ve searched the internet and some of our archives to provide a glimpse of what disability advocates and activists – inside and outside of NDY – have had to say about the man over the years.

This isn’t an exhaustive list.  Through several moves and computer changes, there are some significant press releases, flyers, articles and press coverage I can’t get my hands on right now.  I’ll try to develop some sort of plan to go about gathering and organizing our archives.  For now, please enjoy these.  –Stephen Drake

1993

Disabled Need Care – Not a Visitation by Dr. Kevorkian by Edward John Hudak

1996

Press Release: Disability Activists Declare War on Kevorkian
A High Defends Quality of Life by Mark O’Brien (archive.org)

1997

 Welcome to Kevorky’s Kosmos by editor of Ragged Edge.
Those ol’ Kevorkian blues by Mary Johnson


1998


The Tactics of Survival by CK Montgomery

1999

The Meaning of ‘Murderer’ by Cal Montgomery
Dr. Death on trial in Philadelphia by Jimmi Schrode
Self-execution for witches by Mary Krane Derr
Busy – But Not Dead Yet (profile) by Mary Johnson
Deadly Tactics – by Diane Coleman

2000

A battle waged in Boston: right to die vs. will to live by John B Kelly

ALERT – NDY Discussion of Kevorkian and Assisted Suicide on WBAI Tonight!

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Sorry for the late notice, but I’ll be on Largest Minority Radio Show on WBAI tonight.  The show starts at 9:00 pm ET.  I’ll be on around 9:25 or so.  Here’s the description of the show and how to listen in:

Our next show airs Wednesday, June 8th, at 9:00pm on WBAI.  Our guests will include Aaron Bishop from the National Council on Disability, discussing a Congressional forum they hosted recently regarding the budget proposals currently circulating in Washington.  We’ll also discuss the recent death of Dr. Jack Kevorkian with Stephen Drake, Research Analyst from Not Dead Yet.  Tune in, 9:00pm Eastern at 99.5FM in New York or streaming at wbai.org!

I’d recommend tuning in at 9:00 pm to listen to the first part on the budget proposals floating around DC.  These proposals are of life-and-death importance to disabled people of all ages!

Link to WBAI is here.

Click here tonight to listen live (multiple formats supported)

Like the idea of a disability-oriented show?  Like tonight’s show?

If you’re on Facebook, go the Largest Minority Radio Show page and “like” it.

That’s all for now.  Be talking to y’all later tonight!  –Stephen Drake

A little bit about the REAL Jack Kevorkian – In His Own Words

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It seems that a fair number of people are surprised – even stunned – that me or any disabled person has anything at all bad to say about Kevorkian.  The fact is, as a spoof.com writer put it, most supporters of Jack Kevorkian are “f–king uninformed idiot(s)”.

I think that’s a fair label for people who don’t want to know any more lest they be challenged to reappraise their opinions of Kevorkian. But I think there are some folks – especially in the disability community, who might want to take a look at some things the mainstream media somehow missed.

In the HBO docudrama, careful viewers might have caught a brief discussion regarding Kevorkian’s publication of a book, following the publicity surrounding the assisted suicide of Janet Adkins.  The book in question – Prescription: Medicide: The Goodness of Planned Death – detailed Kevorkian’s history of advocacy regarding live, lethal human experimentation, which went otherwise unmentioned in the movie.

Before he started aiding the suicides of oppressed, despairing ill, old and disabled people, Kevorkian was most well-known for his campaign to start a new “ethic” toward death and human experimentation. He began his campaign in the 1950s, urging legislation that would allow death row prisoners to elect to be put to death through general anesthesia. There was a catch, though. They would also have to agree to be kept alive for hours or days while surgical experiments were performed on them.  (I’m assuming Susan Sarandon didn’t know about this part of his past.  Judging from publicity statements, she was perfectly OK with his aiding the suicides of despairing disabled women.  I think she’d be less OK with experiments on death row prisoners.  Most people I hang out with don’t like either idea or practice.)

So shortly after his assisted suicide crusade began, Kevorkian tried to tell his adoring public what his real goals were.

1991 book . On page 214 of Prescription: Medicide: The Goodness of Planned Death, Kevorkian admitted that assisting “suffering or doomed persons kill themselves” was “merely the first step, an early distasteful professional obligation.…What I find most satisfying,” he wrote, “is the prospect of making possible the performance of invaluable experiments or other beneficial medical acts under conditions that this first unpleasant step can help establish — in a word obitiatry.”(Obitriatry was Kevorkian’s name for his wished-for medical specialty which would involve facilitating deaths, and exploiting the individuals in the killing process through experimentation and organ harvesting.)

Kevorkian’s advocacy wasn’t limited to death row prisoners and it wasn’t limited to people who could express a wish to be killed. Below is an excerpt from a 1988 article in which he describes examples of “daring” experiments that could be performed if his system of ethics were to be adopted. The example below is the last of eleven examples. I’ve also included his remarks following the “case example.”

A full-term infant born with spina bifida, paraplegia, and hydrocephalus is transferred, once proper consent and authorization have been obtained, to an obitorium for research hitherto conducted in rats be researchers interested in the hepatic metabolism of prostaglandin. Test material is given to the anesthetized infant by stomach tube. Two hours later the abdominal cavity is opened, and the intact stomach, small intestine, and liver are removed separately for preservation and subsequent processing for chemical analysis. Meanwhile the infant’s heart and lungs are removed for transplantation elsewhere.

The above fanciful events credibly exemplify several almost self-evident points. First, obitiatry would make it possible to conduct daring and highly imaginative research beyond the constraints of traditional but outmoded, hopelessly inadequate, and essentially irrelevant ethical codes now sustained for the most part by vacuous sentimental reverence. Second, the proposed innovation should be extolled by animal rights advocates, because it would eliminate the need for animals now sacrificed unnecessarily in many aspects of academic and industrial 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, they help accelerate the medical progress so highly prized in our time. (p. 9)

Kevorkian, Jack. The last fearsome taboo: Medical aspects of planned death. Medicine and Law, vol. 7, pp. 1-14

So — anyone out there thinking Jack Kevorkian was a humanitarian and hero – this is what he stood for and it’s what you’re applauding when you applaud his “career.”  –Stephen Drake

Reality Check – Factual Information on Jack Kevorkian from a Surprising Source

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Anyone who is familiar with this blog or has actually done some research on Jack Kevorkian knows that a lot of the news coverage related to his death has been pretty crappy.  The New York Times, Huffington Post – even William Saletan at Slate – credit Kevorkian as someone who “helped” the “terminally ill” (although Saletan thinks he slipped on occasion and accidentally helped the suicide of someone who wasn’t dying).

As you can see from checking the resources on a recent post here, the claim that Jack Kevorkian’s campaign was aimed at helping the “terminally ill” is a load of fetid dingo kidneys.  He never claimed (at least in his writings or before being managed by Mayer Morganroth) to be just concerned with “terminally ill” people.  Kevorkian had a broader calling. 

One of the few places you’ll see it laid out is in a piece at the satire site Spoof.com.

When you click on a link to a satirical article at Spoof, you are directed first to a disclaimer page, in which you are warned:

The story you are trying to access may cause offense, may be in poor taste, or may contain subject matter of a graphic nature.

This story was written as a satire or parody. It is entirely fictitious.

In most cases, that’s an accurate warning.  And, to be fair, the article in question may be offensive to a lot of people.

But everything in the article is true.

Doubt that?  Here’s a sample of “Response To Those Who Believe That Jack Kevorkian was An Angel Of Mercy“:

With respect to those that believe that Jack Kevorkian was a benevolent Angel of Mercy: You’re a f–king uninformed idiot.

Are you aware that at least 60 percent of Kevorkian’s suicide patients were not terminal? Do you know that at least 17 could have lived indefinitely? Are you aware that in THIRTEEN cases, Kevorkian killed people that had NO complaints of pain or quality of life issues?

Obviously not. Dolt.

Before rendering your opinion, did you know that in 1992, Kevorkian wrote it is always mandatory to bring in a psychiatrist because a person’s “mental state is . . . of paramount importance,” yet, in at least 19 cases, Kevorkian did not contact psychiatrists? Or that in at least five of these cases, the people who died had histories of depression?

Doubt it. Asshat.

There’s more.  But you get the drift.  The author – defamationstation – is sharing more factual information about Jack Kevorkian than you’ll find reading CNN, Washington Post, or the New York Times (with the exception of one column by Ross Douthat, which I’ll write about later tonight or tomorrow morning).

That’s the world we live in, apparently.  The so-called “respected” news sources and columnists give us an inaccurate and sanitized account of Jack Kevorkian.  Instead, we have to go to humor site – where it can get published only because it runs under the guise of being satire – and fictional.

Maybe some of the so-called news media – print, online, etc. – ought to consider running a disclaimer warning people that some of their content might be fictional and they’ll have to sort the fiction from the fact for themselves.  That would be some real truth in reporting.