Why disability community opposes doctor assisted suicide

The Connecticut legislature through its Public Health Committee is again considering legalizing assisted suicide despite such efforts having repeatedly failed in the past.

People who have always been able to get the healthcare they want may assume assisted suicide is a choice issue, but persons who have struggled to get care that is free from bias see it as bad public policy. For us, the issue centers around how much and what kind of power a doctor should be given. Disability rights activists who see themselves as progressives are mobilizing.

Doctors are essential components of these laws and authorizing them to prescribe fatal doses of medication is counter to a society that values the health and wellbeing of all. If we enact assisted suicide laws, we normalize death as part of the doctor’s black bag. We expand the role of a doctor from provider of healthcare, be it curative, rehabilitative or palliative, to agent of death.

People are already able to choose among different types of treatment offered or to refuse treatment altogether.

In a searing piece for Hastings Center Reports, anthropology professor William J. Peace, who has paralysis, describes how a hospitalist, who knew nothing about him, gave him the choice to forgo antibiotics rather than endure the rigors, uncertainties, and expenses of recovery from a major pressure wound. Peace’s reaction was fear and demoralization based on the merits of his survival being questioned.

James McGaughey, former executive of Connecticut’s Office of Protection and Advocacy, has written in regard to cases where disabled persons faced denial of life sustaining treatment, “physicians … did not understand the prospects of people with disabilities to live good … lives … and recommendations sometimes reflected confusion concerning the distinction between terminal illness and disability…people with significant disabilities are at risk of having presumptions about the quality of their lives influence the way medical providers … respond to them.”

Already the meaning of the phrase “death with dignity” has gone from death without machines to swallowing pills. Some in the “aid in dying” movement even tentatively talk of euthanasia for persons who are assumed not to be able to act on their own.

Laws for medically assisted suicide do include some nominal “safeguards.” The person must have a prognosis of six months or less to live. The request for the drugs must be in writing. A person’s signature must have at least one witness who is not an heir and so forth. It is unclear how well these safeguards can be enforced — indeed, there is no enforcement mechanism. But even apart from that, no safeguard can guarantee equal access to health services.

No safeguard can prevent mistakes in prognosis. And no safeguard can stop vulnerable people from being coerced. Above all, these laws don’t change prejudices. Assisted suicide or “aid in dying,” as its proponents innocuously call it, presents a clear and present danger to the many people who struggle to access quality healthcare either because they can’t afford it or because they are part of a group that faces medical biases, latent or otherwise.

In these desperate times when so much that is life enhancing is under fire from governmental and societal forces, we in Connecticut must focus our efforts on promoting equal access to healthcare.