Non-disabled people have none of the lived experience of disabled people and it is too easy for them to view ‘so-called quality of life’ from their own perspective, treating life as a disabled person as a disaster, filled with suffering and frustration, as inferior, or as a burden on society.
But as a few have shown, some disabled people also fall into this trap: just look at how Melanie Reid speaks about the subject in The Times (March 27, 2012).
‘From the vantage point of a severely crippled (sic) body…[in a] society facing an unaffordable explosion in dementia and age-related illness…Because of a religious minority, a few antediluvian pressure groups and the might of modern medicine, we are condemning growing numbers of elderly, terminally ill or disabled people to a terrible lingering twilight rather than a good death in the circumstances of their choosing… Yet we are being held back by a tiny number…who either believe the Bible rules it out or are so blinded by the doctrine of palliative care (or perhaps both), that they remove choice from the majority…In an age wedded to the gospel of human rights…we are denied the most basic human right of all… I get angry enough to wish that a few bishops, palliative care specialists and those dedicated campaigners from Care Not Killing — ah! what amazing arrogance lurks in a name — were in my skin, sitting in my shower chair, facing my future…Humanity and economics demand that…assisted dying is extended to become legally available to all those who seek it…’
This is just offensive: for one thing, as a spinally injured disabled person for nearly forty years (and not getting any better!), or as someone born with spinal muscular atrophy, or affected in childhood by polio, none of us can be so disparaged as a religious minority (at Not Dead Yet UK we espouse no religious views), or as arrogantly failing to understand the lived experience of disabled people (not that this is what Care Not Killing are doing, of course). Nor are we from prehistory, although if she cared to spend a moment examining even our recent history, we might hope she would understand a little better how this can go if such an abhorrent law is passed. The Hippocratic oath shows how ancient our reaction is, although neither would I want to appeal to a majority of opinion as any defence – just because a lot of people agree with something doesn’t make it right.
And dismissing those doctors opposed to euthanasia as only belonging to the small dedicated teams of palliative care specialists is just laziness. The poll taken by the BMJ after my head-to-head article with Prof Raymond Tallis showed nearly 70% of doctors against assisted suicide/euthanasia. Even the Falconer report cited research evidence to back up those percentages where in general the number of doctors willing to support assisted suicide/euthanasia fell below 25% – they are the ones I most want to avoid when I become ill!
The fact is we are ‘in your skin’ Ms Reid and most of us know it whole lot longer than the 2 years you have lived as a disabled person. You do us no justice at all by dismissing us as cranks.
We know it takes time to adjust and humanity certainly demands that everyone gets more than a couple of years to do so, since it (quite evidently) takes longer for some than others. But the abuse of those who oppose a view and the demands of economics do not make Ms Reid’s argument any stronger.
And that an uneducated, ill-informed public or press knee-jerks into ‘you wouldn’t do it to a dog’ does not make her position right. Socrates was right: trial be media is no trial at all, rhetoric without truth is one of the greatest threats to a ‘good’ society.
The second big question is what kind of society do we want to live in? Ms Reid might prefer one in which human beings can be assessed for their worth and some judged not worth keeping alive. I prefer one in which every human being has worth first, and in those very few cases where people judge their lives not worth living we explore exactly why that is, and come to far more humane judgements not based on economic burden or the unreasonable and completely untrue notion that we will all die a long lingering horrible death. That just ain’t so.