Yesterday’s (April 29) edition of the Boston Globe featured a long article about some of the issues and players central to November elections in Massachusetts when voters will decide whether or not to legalize assisted suicide in their state.
The good news is that John Kelly, director of Second Thoughts – people with disabilities opposed to legalization of assisted suicide – is one of the people featured in the article. The bad news is that, in line with the general pro-assisted suicide slant of the article, he’s given little actual space in the article in which to articulate the disability rights community’s opposition to legalization of assisted suicide. Below is a great picture the ran of John, followed by his comments in the article:
Opposition extends well beyond the church pews, though, with some self-described liberals, doctors, and specialists in end-of-life care mobilizing against it. A number of them object on moral grounds, believing suicide is wrong and doctors should never abet it; others fear that the sick will be misdiagnosed and end their lives prematurely. “Assisted suicide sounds good in a world where we have perfect knowledge,” says John Kelly, a longtime disability rights advocate in the state who’s helping organize opposition. “It’s impossible to forecast accurately how long someone has to live.”
The reporter – Scott Helman – didn’t even mention that John is the director of an organization that opposes legalization, which to most readers will translates as meaning John Kelly is only representing himself in this article and in this issue.
Similarly, the longest passages given over to individuals are to proponents of assisted suicides – and perhaps more importantly – their stories. Stories tend to stick with readers longer than policy analysis – on either side of this debate.
Also, and most harmful to disability activists in this political fight, when Helman invokes Kevorkian’s name he omits mentioning that most of Kevorkian’s body count consisted of non-terminally ill women with chronic conditions and disabilities. That piece of information makes the insistence of disability activists that we be part of this debate a lot more comprehensible to the general public.
I’m hoping John can write sometime this week with some reactions and reflections on this experience and how to better fight this uphill battle in the media – the same uphill battle we’ve all been fighting on a national level for over 15 years. –Stephen Drake
To read the whole article, you can access either this link or this one.
With this issue, as with any other that resides on the edge of controversy, too many people read headlines and think they have the full story. It is good to remember that no report can be written without the subconscious influence of the writer. It is frustrating, but it is part of human reality. It is great that NDY continues to point this out, and to speak out on the issue.
I’d like a journalist to find some honest “pro-assisted suicide” supporters who will say their real reasons for legalizing murder of vulnerable people who are no threat, i.e. the murder of disabled, ill and elderly people. In the 1930s, the physicians in Germany were very open about why they went “all out” killing disabled people before getting to Jews (which would have made me a “two-fer”) in support of state policy. Here “real” motives are hidden behind “humanitarian” reasons. (Being political in my old age, I note similar baloney-
as we used to call it in Brooklyn when I was a kid– “humanitarian” for bombing countries in recent and earlier decades. One old example: the U.S. destroyed villages in Vietnam to “save them”.
PR has become more slick and directed, such as in “assisted suicide” slanted media coverage.
Is it as simple as “austerity” and we’re too “pricey”? Are we not “pretty” enough? (In the Bambi sense.) (Frieda Zames pointed out in her book on the history of disability activism, that Chicago had “ugly laws” at the end of the 19th century banning wheelchair users from certain places, like restaurants. Think that’s only “then”? I heard a U.S. business guy upon his return from a decade of working in China in the 1990s say that disabled people can’t go to college because they were considered “ugly”. Also, we are cheap source of body parts- Assisted suicide allows for advance planning for “harvest”. Always euphemisms for nasty business.