The In the News page on the NDY website links to print and broadcast news pieces that include interview quotes or other mentions of Not Dead Yet or our disability allies. The vast majority of articles and broadcasts are about assisted suicide laws. The pattern, with rare exception, is that the attention on the disability perspective is a tiny fraction of the total piece.
That said, Sara Luterman’s article in The Nation, a magazine founded by abolitionists in 1865 and described as a “progressive American biweekly magazine that covers political and cultural news, opinion, and analysis,” is an incredible breakthrough. Entitled “Can Americans Really Make a Free Choice About Dying?“, Luterman’s piece tells the story of disability opposition to assisted suicide laws to progressives who have previously almost exclusively heard about conservative opponents. We hope our message will be heard.
Some quotes:
Disabled bodies are regarded with a sort of fetishistic curiosity at best and revulsion at worst. And people with disabilities are frequently not given the resources they need to live or the assistance they need to participate fully in society. The poverty rate for disabled people is more than double that of nondisabled people, and the unemployment rate for disabled people is more than double that of nondisabled people. The responsibility for care that is shirked by the state frequently falls on families, who are overwhelmed. Instead of being given the resources they need to thrive, many, if not most, people with disabilities are treated like expensive burdens.
Considering all of that, advocates ask, how could a disabled person’s decision to die be considered a free choice? It is not the disabilities that ruin lives, they say; it is the system and society that fails to support disabled people. “It’s not religious, nor is it pro-life,” said Diane Coleman, the president of Not Dead Yet, speaking of the advocacy movement. “It’s about going up against a ‘better dead than disabled’ mindset.”
[Anita] Cameron is an out and proud Black lesbian. She shared her thoughts on the “strange bedfellows” that the disability rights movement has made with the religious right on the subject of medical aid in dying. “The people I work with on a regular basis on this issue? A lot of them would not have me in their home,” Cameron said. “They would not eat dinner with me. They are diametrically opposed to my very existence. And yet somehow, we have managed to put that aside.”
The alliance is not without tension, but Cameron … sees it as part of a fight for survival: “We know how the medical community mistreats us. They want to get rid of us. If you’re sick, you can be pushed into assisted suicide…. As marginalized people, we see the discrimination we go through at the hands of the medical establishment.”
Jules Good, 23, is the assistant director of Not Dead Yet. They are autistic, deaf, and have a complex chronic illness. …”When I was 18, I got a pretty rough diagnosis. I was super depressed and attempted suicide. And when I went to my first counseling appointment with a new therapist after that happened, I explained my whole deal. And she looked me in the eye and said, ‘Yeah, I’d probably kill myself if I were you,'” Good told me….
Like Cameron, Good is uncomfortable with the alliance that the movement has built with the pro-life movement. When asked if it was difficult to work with these groups as a trans person, Good said …, “As much as I struggle sometimes with people who would probably prefer I wasn’t around, the goal of protecting people from dangerous legislation outweighs that for me, personally.”…
What Good and Not Dead Yet want to do is make sure that people with disabilities are heard. Not Dead Yet believes that because people with disabilities are on the front lines of the medical system, they can alert society to the dangers that others cannot yet see.
To read the whole article, go HERE.