Assisted suicide was offered to my friend Jane Allen. She had an eating disorder. (OPINION: Reprinted in full below from the October 2, 2025 edition of The Denver Post)

By Matt Vallière | Guest Commentary

PUBLISHED: October 2, 2025 at 5:01 AM MDT

The big selling point of assisted suicide laws is that they are supposedly compassionate and a progressive step toward enlightened autonomy. But assisted suicide is anything but compassionate for vulnerable people, like the tragic story of my friend with anorexia, Jane Allen, which shows how assisted suicide laws threaten the lives of the young and curable.

There is a controversial diagnosis circulating called “terminal anorexia,” which is an arrow to the heart of young people with eating disorders who are already experiencing distorted ideas of their worthiness to live. Now, where assisted suicide is legal, they have the state and part of the medical profession telling them they were better off dead.

After struggling with anorexia for most of her life, in 2018, Jane was living in Colorado Springs and getting help for her mental health disabilities, including her eating disorder. She ended up in the care of an exclusive boutique eating disorder practice. She was in and out of hospitals and residential treatment. Jane’s condition resisted treatment, and she ended up receiving a “terminal anorexia” diagnosis.

Jane wrote that her eating disorder doctor, “would ‘make an exception’ for me and ‘allow’ me to die, if that was my choice. It didn’t feel like my choice – I felt coerced and spent an incredibly agonizing months in an assisted living facility.” Jane did not get the lethal prescription directly from her eating disorder doctor; instead, she was referred to another doctor who promptly checked the boxes required under Colorado’s “safeguards,” and saw to it that Jane got the lethal drugs.

Jane’s life was saved at the last minute when her father received a guardianship order from a Colorado judge and was able to have the lethal drugs destroyed. After that, Jane said, “I ate just enough to not die right away. And then I ate more. I weaned off the morphine and all the other hospice drugs that kept me in such a fog. I was getting better, and then I was told that I was too much of a liability and dropped from the [boutique] clinic.”

“I moved from Colorado to Oregon. I have a job that I love, a new puppy, and a great group of friends. I’m able to fuel my body to hike and do the things I love. I’m repairing my relationship with my family, and I have a great therapist who is helping me process all of this. Things obviously aren’t perfect, and I still have hard days. But I also have balance, and flexibility, and a life that is so much more than I was told would ever be possible for me.”

A week before she planned to go public with her story, however, she died suddenly of complications to her health caused by over two decades of starving herself. To this day, I wonder whether the months of treatment lost during Jane’s detour into “terminal anorexia” care worsened her condition, whether she could still be with us today, doing all the good. We’ll never know…

What we do know is that these laws are not so rosy as the propaganda would have you believe. They are as messy as life itself and there has been and will be more collateral damage in people like Jane or Coloradan, Mary Gossman, who was told by a nationally renowned Denver eating disorder treatment facility, “there’s nothing we can do for you,” which qualified her for lethal drugs under the law. She’s in a better place now and has joined as a plaintiff in a lawsuit to overturn the law. So, I ask: how many collateral deaths are acceptable to you? For whatever purported good they do, these laws just aren’t safe.

Matt Vallière is the executive director of the Patient Rights Action Fund and the Institute for Patient Rights both of which advocate against physician assisted suicide policies.

Not Dead Yet Attends Bazelon’s 2025 Annual Awards Reception

On September 17, 2025, I was pleased to attend on behalf of Not Dad Yet the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law’s 2025 Annual Awards Reception at the National Press Club. The event was larger than normal. I was surrounded by countless people,  disability rights movement members both well-known and obscure. We had come to celebrate our past and usher in the next chapter of our history.

A recording of the awards ceremony is available at the following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pV9yDclCuK0

The event honored first Congressman Steny Hoyer, one of the pioneers who worked to pass the Americans with Disabilities Act – our very own bill of rights in the United States. Hoyer spoke on the circumstances of the ADA’s passage and his debt of gratitude to his mentor. He also spoke of his gratitude towards the thousands of disabled Americans who advocated tirelessly for the bill in the late 1980s and early 90s.

As we watched a video before Congressman Hoyer took the stage, I marveled at the perseverance these early advocates must have had. They were willing to put their lives and dignity on the line to obtain their future. As Interim Deputy Director and an autistic woman who has never consciously known a world before the ADA, I am only too aware of the debt that I owe them. To honor their legacy, we must fully fund the long term services and supports that keep people with disabilities alive and strenuously fight (as they did) the forces that would treat our lives as worthless.

The event’s other awardees were strong as well. Senator Blunt Rochester spoke of the urgent need to come together. Keris Jän Myrick, a skilled mental health advocate and professional known for her person-centered and transformative work, spoke passionately about the divide between policy, rhetoric, and lived experience – and the need to connect them. Steve Rosenbaum, receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award, spoke in depth about the long history of the DOJ as a positive force for social change and its recent downsizing. He urged civil rights attorneys to continue the DOJ’s past work.

Although the event was hosted by Bazelon, which focuses on mental health, the awardees’ bold statements could apply to my own cause as well. The people who came before us (the late Diane Coleman included) established a strong, principled, disability rights-specific position on assisted suicide and euthanasia laws. She fought successfully to prevent the passage of a legally absurd, oversight-obliterating, dehumanizing regime in almost every state. Even when setbacks arise, the work of the people who come after founders and trailblazers is to carry the torch that they lit forward, and allow it to bring more of the world into the light.

Kelly Israel

Interim Deputy Director, Not Dead Yet

From Albany, New York, Tuesday September 16, 2025:

In collaboration with the 2025 New York Association on Independent Living’s (NYAIL) statewide conference, the New York State Independent Living Council (NYSILC) held its sixth New York State Disability Rights Hall of Fame awards ceremony and dinner, and Not Dead Yet’s Founder and CEO, Diane Coleman, was the first of the night to be honored with a posthumous award “For lifelong achievements which positively impact people with disabilities in society.”

For those who couldn’t attend the awards ceremony and dinner, the Patients Rights Action Fund’s (PRAF) Executive Director, Matt Vallière, and NDY’s Executive Director, Ian McIntosh, accepted the award on behalf of Diane Coleman who passed away suddenly, last November 1, 2024.

Also, please find NDY’s acceptance speech directly below:

NDY’s acceptance speech:

I know if Diane were here to receive this award, on behalf of NDY’s Board and Staff, and with gratitude, that she would turn to Matt and thank him for his friendship and his fight in this arena, so, thank you, Matt, and thank you to all involved in honouring Diane tonight.

Matt asked: Why did Diane care so much about the Community in the face of so many other pressing issues? In addition to Diane’s peerless dedication and results, already mentioned, I think there’s something else to be gleaned from Diane’s own words in remembering disability rights champion and dear sister-in-arms, Marilyn Golden. A couple of years ago, Diane wrote:

“The things we almost never mentioned were science fiction, music from our younger days and favorite TV shows. I really wish we had. I can imagine the great fun we could have enjoyed over those things and I’m sorry we didn’t. Still, I’m so glad she made room for all those things and so much more in her beautiful life.”

For Diane, in fighting for access, in pushing against the profit margins of big pharma and big insurance in order to cross the finish line as full citizens, the reason Diane cared so much about the community stems precisely from the word we remember Diane with tonight: Honour; Not honour as merely the act of fondly remembering, but in the repeated daily example of self-sacrifice for something of priceless value, like a life with room for beautiful friendships, and time to spend together laughing without worrying about basic needs being met.

Diane refused to let this war be sidelined by other battles. She knew that if we lose this one, all the other ones will be lost, too, because accepting Assisted Suicide and inevitably Euthanasia laws, is to accept ableist notions that suicide is rational just because you have a disability, or that disabled lives are worth less than nondisabled ones. And if we accept that proposition, then there’s no end to the horrors that other ableist policy areas can and will provide.

 Michael Hickson’s life and death warned us. The recent HHS announcement that they’re investigating what appears to be a practice of harvesting organs from people with newly acquired disabilities who were given up on or whose signs of life were ignored to obtain something deemed more valuable than a disabled life — an organ from that disabled person — that announcement warns us. Diane warned us.

The name Not Dead Yet, as some of you may know was taken from a British comedy, a Monty Python movie about the crusades. Not Dead Yet is the name of Diane’s organization, and certainly referential in part to the idea that humour in the face of unjust authority is a good thing. But to be clear, with over 60 arrests to her credit, every time Diane mentioned the name Not Dead Yet, it was a taunt, a challenge: To ableist proponent activists and lawmakers, and those in the healthcare community that champion medical futility and disability bias. Not Dead Yet is a way of saying in the fight against assisted suicide laws – as Sparsh Shah compressed so wonderfully – that “We are Disabled but We are Unbreakable.”

However, wherever, whenever, as you can, join us in this fight for our lives.

Diane, we love you.

May we be forever in your debt.

On behalf of Not Dead Yet, sincere thanks to: Laura Cardwell, Executive Director of NYSILC; Lindsay Miller, Executive Director of NYAIL; Yaw Appiadu, Executive Director of Harlem Independent Living Center and Chair of NYSILC; Mariah Sepulveda, Honorary Committee Chair and everyone at the Albany Capital Center who made the night such a resounding success.

Congratulations to inductees: Christian Curry, Doug Hovey, Bryan O’Malley and Sharon Shapiro (Lacks) – all of whom acknowledged Diane Coleman’s immeasurable contribution to their own work – delivered speeches filled with wisdom, laughter, tears and hope for a New York and an America where disability advocacy emerges from the shadows and onto the forefront of American civil rights discourse.

From the NYS Disability Rights Hall of Fame awards program, Yaw Appiadu, Chair of NYSILC noted so poignantly of the night’s imminent inductees: “Their legacy lights the path forward toward a more just and inclusive future for all.”

The last words are always Diane’s:

“The official data shows that everyone who dies by assisted suicide is disabled, some terminal, some not, and their reasons are unmet disability related needs, especially for in home care. Enough is enough. Now, with our federal civil rights laws, the ADA, Section 504, and the Constitution, we’re going to fight this most deadly form of disability discrimination. We are Not Dead Yet. “

In Solidarity,

Ian McIntosh,

Executive Director for Not Dead Yet.