Eileen Mihich deserved better.
Aging With Dignity has put out a powerful, short film that further dispels the disingenuous claims by ableist proponents of assisted suicide laws that there has never been a single instance in which safeguards have failed. To the assisted suicide proponent question: Where is the evidence of abuse, coercion and error? The Tragedy of Eileen Mihich is an emphatic: Here it is!
For many outside of the disability community, the concept of disability bias and medical futility is difficult to grasp, in the rare instances it’s known of at all. Medical futility and assisted suicide are stems from the same disability bias branch which sees disabled lives as lives not worth living. Assisted suicide legislation, where the state enacts so-called healthcare policy that calls and provides death a cure, is merely the monstrous culmination of disability bias, albeit discharged by a delivery system on a much larger scale, but from the same eugenical engine. Whether it’s denial, delay or direction toward assisted suicide as an equivocal option to a legitimate cure, the tragedy of Eileen Mihich is not unlike that of Michael Hickson where the perception of life with a disability is devalued as a life worth less, a worthless life and better off dead.
Eileen was devalued by her family first, and then the system. Eileen needed protection from her family owing to abuse and neglect and trauma from a young age. Into adulthood, Eileen suffered from severe mental illness and still needed protection, delivered in the most caring, compassionate manner possible.
Instead, Eileen was abandoned by our broken healthcare system, and once she set her foot into the proverbial doorway of the assisted suicide enterprise, she was pulled in, and the very safeguards that proponents assured would save Eileen, disappeared. According to Eileen’s Aunt Veronica, so did assisted suicide proponents when tasked to stand by their assurances. She noted that for Eileen: “It wasn’t that hard for her to exploit [the so-called safeguards] and that’s really dangerous.”
During the film, there is a clear pattern provided by Eileen’s Aunt, in which time after time, whether it was the death doula, the pharmacist or those in professional assisted suicide advocacy organizations, Eileen, an obviously conflicted young woman with severe mental illness, is repeatedly abandoned. She is never seen as a life worth saving, but rather, an opportunity to validate the idea that suicide is rational if you happen to have a disability.
Eileen was sad. But even in her darkest moments, Eileen texted: “I don’t actually want to die.”
Eileen’s Aunt ultimately concluded: “I place more guilt on the Death With Dignity people.”
She added that this organization (who campaigned on promises of assured safeguards), didn’t respond in a way that could be seen as human, didn’t want to take accountability, weren’t shocked and didn’t appear to hold the view that Eileen’s death and the circumstances surrounding it, were unacceptable.
A conclusion that’s hard to argue against when the history of assisted suicide legislation demonstrates that once an incipient bill is passed, so-called safeguards turn into barriers that must be removed in order to provide “meaningful access”.
She added, “The road to hell is paved with the best intentions” at the end of an observation in which she believes that Washington’s Death With Dignity Act was conceived and launched with the best of intentions, and yet despite those intentions, failed Eileen.
What Not Dead Yet, and the other disability rights organizations who have been fighting assisted suicide legislation for decades have been repeating, is that the instance a bill is passed, the bait and switch follows. And at every opportunity, we have countered proponent narratives that there has never been a single instance of abuse, coercion or error. In order for their claims to fail, abuse, coercion or error only has to happen once. And of course, as we know, it has happened multiple times, here in America and in other international jurisdictions.
At the writing of this blog, New York Governor Kathy Hochul has joined fellow Democrat Governor of Illinois, J.B. Pritzker in allowing assisted suicide to endanger their states’ most vulnerable people. Both mentioned signing bills on the condition of safeguards. As an example, in New York, a few key protections listed that will go into the bill are: Limiting access to New York residents and mandatory mental health evaluations by a psychologist or psychiatrist.
But Eileen Mihich died under Washington’s Death With Dignity Act despite not being a resident of Washington state and despite not having received a mandatory mental health evaluation by a psychologist or psychiatrist (amongst other compromised safeguards) and yet still gained access to lethal drugs which she clearly conveyed she intended to use to kill herself.
The Tragedy of Eileen Mihich is a must-see and reaffirms the fact that assisted suicide laws are not designed to maintain initially advertised safeguards, which have never worked, and will never work.
It is a mistake to believe that the intentions of professional assisted suicide advocacy organizations aren’t to create laws that don’t resemble those run amok in other “jurisdictions” like Canada and the Netherlands, where assisted suicide is either poised to be offered where mental illness is the sole criterion, or is in full systematic flight.
And as such, it is a horrifying but necessary realization to understand, that in this space, for some, Eileen’s death was acceptable, and worse: it was deemed right and rational because she was disabled.
Ian McIntosh
Executive Director
Not Dead Yet