Source: Times Union
By: Mike Volkman
The debate over assisted suicide continues. A bill has not passed in New York yet, but it keeps getting reintroduced every session in the legislature. Its proponents everywhere keep using a catchphrase, “death with dignity,” to describe it. They even use it as a title for it.
The main points of their argument for why we need to legalize assisted suicide is that there are incurable diseases that will end up killing people anyway, and those diseases cause intractable pain. They say they have a right to choose when and how they die, so they should have the freedom to make that choice. It is a quick and easy argument.
It’s not so simple. Doctors are not perfect and don’t know everything. It is impossible to make an accurate prediction with how much time a person has left. The late Ted Kennedy was told he had months, but he hung on for several years. Insurance companies deny treatments based on many factors, but in states that now allow assisted suicide they are more willing to pay for lethal doses when they are prescribed. If people are making choices based on economic factors, that is coercion, not freedom.
Another major factor that it is deeply ingrained in Western cultures is that people are better off dead than being disabled. You can find references to studies on the Not Dead Yet website and blog that show how common it is for people to choose to die not because they are in intractable pain, but because something changed in their circumstances and they acquired a disability. Nobody ever expects this to happen, and when it does they are confronted with fears they have had their whole lives. Those fears are reinforced by the most respected institutions in society: family, government, the schools, religious teachings, medicine, architecture, the arts, and the press, just to name a few. People are seriously scared of the idea that they might need some help in order to stay independent.
What does it mean to die with dignity? Or the opposite, what is death without dignity or with indignity? There is no legal definition. It is a phrase people like to use with the hope that it is sufficient and accepted. Remember the bit George Carlin did in 1992 about euphemisms? They hide the truth.
Legislative bodies should come up with legal definitions for the term. They should specify what constitutes dignified ways of dying. When they come to define what are undignified ways of dying, the challenge is how to do it without describing circumstances that go with disability. Because if they can’t get around that, then it makes one thing perfectly clear.
That one thing is that it is in the interests of the state to protect all lives except those of people with disabilities. If the presence of a disability, whether it is from birth or from later acquisition, makes it justifiable to place a value judgment on a person for a life-or-death decision, that makes an entire class of people subject to a double standard. That is state-sponsored bigotry allowing up to one sixth of the population to be discarded and unprotected.
Afraid of needing help? Imagine living in a world in which no one was willing to provide it. Afraid of tubes? Imagine a time when they weren’t invented. Today’s tubes make life much more bearable and livable for those of us who use them. Like me.
Choice is free when people and states do all that they can to help us live better.
Mike Volkman of Albany is a longtime disability rights advocate. He is a member of the board of Not Dead Yet.