This document is testimony presented to the Hawaii State Senate on 3/18/02 related to their consideration of a bill legalizing physician assisted suicide. It was also submitted to Honolulu and Hilo newspapers.

The Civil Rights Opposition to Assisted Suicide

Public discussion of the assisted suicide bill has missed one important point. Assisted suicide supporters have almost all claimed that opposition comes only from religious conservatives. This is false. Assisted suicide is opposed on a secular, progressive, civil rights basis by at least eleven national disability organizations. The reasons fit very well with the progressive tradition of Hawaii’s Democratic Party. Conscientious Democrats who support the proposed assisted suicide law need to recognize this argument.

I am a member of Not Dead Yet, a national organization of disability rights activists who oppose assisted suicide on civil rights grounds. I am a strong advocate of civil rights, of government responsibility for social justice and welfare, and of a woman’s right to abortion. I agree with the religious right on almost nothing, except opposing assisted suicide. Some of my friends are surprised by my opposition, and think that Not Dead Yet is being duped by religious conservatives. Not true. The ACLU works alongside the Catholic Church in opposing the death penalty, and no one questions their liberal credentials. Not Dead Yet does the same thing.

As I see it, the arguments for assisted suicide are a form of libertarianism, a political view based on extreme individualism. Libertarians support the legalization of all drugs, including heroin, and oppose civil rights laws and workplace safety regulation. Individualism run wild. Hawaii’s Democrats have always recognized the dangers of individualistic extremism. But they seem unaware that a social policy of assisted suicide has the very same dangers.

Democrats can see through most libertarian individualism. They see through big-business conservatives who would like to eliminate both minimum wage and occupational safety standards. The conservatives say that individuals should be able to “choose for themselves” whether to work for pennies, and whether to work in an unsafe workplace. Democrats recognize that minimum wage and occupational safety laws are necessary. The so-called rights of individuals to accept slave wages and hazardous jobs are blocked by laws passed by Democrats to protect vulnerable workers from exploitation. Without such laws, the choice of a low paying or dangerous job would not be free but forced. A forced choice (“Risk your life or you’ll be fired”) is not a free choice, and Democrats know it.

Not Dead Yet believes that the so-called free choice of assisted suicide is a forced choice, and it leads to the same kind of exploitation. The freedom it offers for a few people is paid for by the exploitation of many others. Terminally ill or disabled people sometimes do have suicidal feelings when they feel a lack of support, or a shame for their own condition, or when they feel that they are a burden on their families. The desire for death under those conditions is not a free choice, but a forced choice.

The bill before the legislature does not mention suicide for people with disabilities, but only for people who are terminally ill. So why should people with disabilities worry? It is because we have studied the rhetoric of the assisted suicide movement. The rhetoric gives two reasons for suicide: pain and disability. In recent years they have played down pain, because they know that almost all pain is medically treatable. What’s left is disability.

Janet Good of the Hemlock Society puts it this way: "Pain is not the main reason we want to die. It's the indignity. It's the inability to get out of bed or get to the toilet, let alone drive a car or shop without another's help.” A Honolulu attorney and member of the Governor’s Blue Ribbon Committee on Death with Dignity said on KHET in 1996 that he was not afraid of dying, but he was afraid of “being in diapers and being dependent on others.” These are the reasons they want assisted suicide.

Better dead than disabled.

Hundreds of Hawaii’s citizens live every day with the same disabilities that these assisted suicide advocates think are so horrible. Many of us have families, and jobs. Most of us love life. What message can we take from the fear and loathing of disability that we hear from assisted suicide advocates? That we would be better off dead. The advocates won’t say this in so many words, of course. If you ask them, they will claim that they actually respect disabled people (even though they would rather die than be one). I am not convinced.

The proposed law applies only to people with terminal illnesses. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This doesn’t make me feel any better. The law applies to terminally ill people because of their disabilities. The assisted suicide movement has traditionally advocated suicide not just for terminally ill people, but for non-terminal people with disabilities as well. The emphasis on terminal illness is a new strategy designed to make legislation easier to pass. It is a slippery slope from suicide for terminally ill people because they are disabled, to suicide for disabled people who happen not to be terminally ill.

Many assisted suicide advocates want that slope to be as slippery as possible. Derek Humphrey, the granddaddy of the movement, made the following prediction in his famous suicide manual Final Exit: “What can those of us who sympathize with a justified suicide by a handicapped person do to help? When we have statutes on the books permitting lawful physician aid-in-dying for the terminally ill, I believe that along with this reform there will come a more tolerant attitude to the other exceptional cases.” Humphrey is eager to grease the skids of this slippery slope. We feel threatened for good reason.

Democrats have led the national fight for Patients’ Rights legislation to protect against the cost-cutting excesses of HMOs. How much money do you suppose an HMO could save by assisting a suicide rather than providing health care to a seriously ill patient? The choice would have to be “voluntary” of course, as the assisted suicide advocates keep reminding us. But how tempting will it be to a thrifty HMO executive to make sure that costly patients are well informed of their right to an inexpensive assisted suicide? Barbara Coombs Lee is a coauthor of the Oregon assisted suicide bill. She was an executive with an Oregon HMO during the time she wrote the bill. Coincidence?

Medical encouragement for quicker deaths of people with disabilities is not just a paranoid fantasy. I have a friend named Henry who lives in California. Henry, like me, is disabled from polio and a wheelchair user. Henry also has a heart condition. His HMO doctor invited Henry to sign a DNR, a Do Not Resuscitate order, so that if he had a heart attack he would not be resuscitated. The doctor believed that Henry’s life must be so miserable that he should not want to live after a heart attack. Henry refused to sign the DNR. The doctor offered it again at his next visit. And his next. Henry finally changed his HMO in order to escape this doctor’s “care.” Who knows how many other people with disabilities were convinced to sign away their rights to medical care by this doctor’s bigotry against disability?

Democrats are exactly the people we expect to protect us from this kind of exploitation. They are also the people we had hoped would support our civil rights. The web site of the Hawaii Democratic Party says this: “We advocate social, health, and educational programs targeted to our keiki, our kupuna, our sick, our disabled, and our disadvantaged, so that we malama [care for] our most vulnerable people.”

Wake up, Democrats. Don’t vote for assisted suicide just because the religious right is against it! Think for yourselves. Assisted suicide is a betrayal of your commitment to civil rights for all, and your promise to protect your most vulnerable people. People with disabilities and illnesses need social support, whether they are terminal or not. They do not need the forced choice of assisted suicide.