Disability Rights Leadership Institute on Bioethics:

Assisted Suicide Laws

Disability Rights LeadershipInstitute on Bioethics:

 

Assisted Suicide LawsMarilyn Golden

Senior Policy AnalystDisability Rights Education & Defense Fund (DREDF)

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Assisted suicide proposals & laws

• Threat of major public policy changes, regularly & often

• Far more often fail than pass – if we stop them

• What does “assisted suicide” mean?

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Assisted suicide proposals & laws (cont’d.)

• Fought by coalitions spanning political spectrum

• Actually decrease choice and self-determination

• Think outside the medical model

• Terminology

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Legal Alternatives Available Today

Which include:

• Palliative care

• Palliative sedation

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Some of our objections relate

specifically to the

disability community

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Disability-related objections

1.Suicide prevention vs. suicide assistance

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The “public image of severe disability as a fate worse than death … become[s] grounds for carving out a deadly exception to longstanding laws and public policies about suicide intervention services … Legalizing assisted suicide means that some people who say they want to die will receive suicide intervention, while others will receive suicide assistance. The difference between these two groups of people will be their health or disability status, leading to a two-tiered system that results in death to the socially devalued group.”

– Diane Coleman, President, Not Dead Yet –

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Description of following cartoon:

This cartoon shows a wheelchair user in front of a Suicide Prevention Program with many steps up to the door. But around the corner, there’s a wheelchair ramp leading to another door labeled “Assisted Suicide.”

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Assisted Suicide Laws

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Disability-related objections

2. Consider the Netherlands

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“The Netherlands has moved from assisted suicide to euthanasia, from euthanasia for the terminally ill to euthanasia for the chronically ill, from euthanasia for physical illness to euthanasia for psychological distress and from voluntary euthanasia to nonvoluntary and involuntary euthanasia. Once the Dutch accepted assisted suicide it was not possible legally or morally to deny more active medical [assistance to die], i.e. euthanasia, to those who could not effect their own deaths.

(Quote continues >)

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“Nor could they deny assisted suicide or euthanasia to the chronically ill who have longer to suffer than the terminally ill or to those who have psychological pain not associated with physical disease. To do so would be a form of discrimination. Involuntary euthanasia has been justified as necessitated by the need to make decisions for patients not [intellectually] competent to choose for themselves.”

– Dr. Herbert Hendin, Congressional testimony –

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Disability-related objections

3. Terminal Illness Prognosis

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A Fundamental Loophole

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Disability-related objections

4. Danger to people with depression

and psychiatric disabilities

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The Myth of Free Choice

and Self-Determination

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A Deadly Mix:\\\\

The deadly combination of assisted suicide

and our broken, profit-driven

US health care system

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Description of following cartoon:To show we’re not the only ones this

notion has occurred to, here’s a cartoon we found with a health care executive at a desk, commenting to a colleague, “We’re able to hold down healthcare

costs through assisted suicide.”

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Assisted Suicide Laws

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Other Failures of

“Safeguards”

in the Oregon law

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Other Failures of “Safeguards”

in the Oregon law:

Doctor shopping

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Percentage of Reported Oregon DeathsThrough C&C Assistance(examples of particular years)

•  Through 2002: “About 75%”• In 2003: 79%• In 2008: 88%

(These are typical, not outliers…)

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Other Failures of “Safeguards”

in the Oregon law:

Good faith standard

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The safeguards do work for someone: The doctors!

The safeguards do work for someone: The doctors!

• Doctors are not held liable if they act in “good faith,” an

impossible standard to disprove.• The “good faith” standard makes

all of the other “safeguards” unenforceable.

• For all other procedures, doctors are liable if they are negligent.

• Doctors are not held liable if they act in “good faith,” an

impossible standard to disprove.• The “good faith” standard makes

all of the other “safeguards” unenforceable.

• For all other procedures, doctors are liable if they are negligent.

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Oregon:Minimal Data & Fatally Flawed

Oversight

•  Reporting requirements lack teeth• Non-compliance is not monitored• Important questions go unasked• No investigation of abuse• No autopsies

• Underlying data is destroyed annually

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The Political Landscape also includes:

Organizations such as Final Exit Network

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The Political Landscape also includes:

The ACLU

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The Political Landscape also includes:

Us!

In multi-constituency coalitions

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