Testimony of John Kelly
Director of Second Thoughts Massachusetts
Joint Committee on Public Health
H.2246 / S.1331
An Act Relative to end-of-life options
October 20, 2023
I am an older white man lying on myside with a red shirt. I am director of Second Thoughts Massachusetts: Disability Rights Advocates Against Assisted Suicide.
Re: public support for assisted suicide, Gallup has found over many years that over 70% of people support euthanasia for people who are incurable, meaning disabled and chronically disabled. There is a lot of ableism out there!
After I became paralyzed below the shoulders in 1984, I learned that many people consider lives like mine not worth it.
The same reasons that people choose assisted suicide – loss of mobility, feeling like a burden on family, loss of so-called dignity, incontinence, have for generations justified the deaths of disabled people.
It’s just another incremental step to make non-terminal disabled people eligible for this as has happened in Canada and much of Europe. Experts like Thaddeus Pope predict that disabled people like me will become eligible in the US.
And that’s why disability rights groups have filed a federal lawsuit in California charging that its assisted suicide program denies disabled people suicide prevention services others receive.
Many of us already get told, straight to our face and through medical hostility, that we might be better off dead. Legalized assisted suicide makes that prejudice official policy.
Every leading national disability rights group that has taken a position on assisted suicide has come out against it.
State government must not sponsor a program that sets up invidious comparisons between the value of people’s lives. Our democracy demands it.