Opponents for legalized assisted suicide held a virtual legislative briefing on Tuesday, May 10, which prompted news outlets to seek a statement from Second Thoughts director John Kelly.
Over the last 15 years, the Mass legislature and, in 2012, the people of the state, have wisely rejected the legalization of assisted suicide as too dangerous. The legislature should likewise reject S1384, which despite its name does not provide dying people “end-of-life options.”
The tragic reality is that under legalized assisted suicide, some people’s lives will be ended without their true consent, through misdiagnosis, persuasion, coercion and abuse, insurance denials and depression. No safeguards have ever been enacted or proposed that can prevent this outcome, which can never be undone.
NPR reported five years ago that up to 20% of people who enter hospice outlive their six months prognosis. In Oregon, 4% of people who enter the assisted suicide program are alive at the end of six months. The difference between 4% and 20% is the percent of people and their families who may have lost months, years, and in some cases decades of meaningful life.
There is no way to contain eligibility to a narrow set of people. Anorexia nervosa and diabetes now qualify as terminal conditions in other states. Disabled people like me are eligible in Canada, and some predict disabled people will be eligible here.
Proponents always talk about pain and suffering, but the end-of-life concerns in Oregon show that people are upset about depending on other people and are feeling like a burden.
Just as many people disqualify me from full humanity because of my disability, some people disqualify themselves and are disqualified by others when they need help.
The state of Massachusetts must not sponsor people’s suicides because other people consider them a burden, because they believe they are dying when they are not, and because they have been denied the treatment and support services that would keep them alive.
My name is Ruthie Poole, and I am the president of M-POWER, a statewide group made up of people with lived experience of mental health diagnosis, trauma, and addiction.
As people with psychiatric disabilities, M-POWER members feel passionately about the right to self-determination. However, that is not what this bill is about.
It is not uncommon for people with disabilities and elders who may not be physically well to feel like they’re a burden on their families. Prescribing doctors in Oregon last year reported that more than half of program suicides felt like a burden on family, friends, or caregivers. Sadly, if physician assisted suicide were to become law in Massachusetts, some people may be coerced, either subtly or more obviously, by their families to agree to this.
The bills have a provision requiring people requesting assisted suicide to have a counseling appointment to determine that the person “is capable and not suffering from a psychiatric or psychological disorder or depression causing impaired judgment.”
Historically, people with psychiatric diagnoses have been subjected to all forms of legal and extra-legal coercion, often abetted by these same professionals. Gatekeeping professionals continue to underestimate our capabilities and block us from living our own lives. Based on these experiences, we cannot trust that counselors will have our best interests in mind when evaluating our motives for requesting assisted suicide.
At the same time, people in the midst of a severe depression can usually present as “unimpaired,” especially in a single meeting with an unknown counselor.
Those of us in M-POWER know that depression is insidious. We know that depression does impair judgment. As a therapist once told me, depression does not cause black and white thinking; it causes black and blacker thinking. Absolute hopelessness and seeing no way out are common feelings for those of us who have experienced severe depression. Personally, as someone who has been suicidal in the past, I can relate to the desire for “a painless and easy way out.” However, depression is treatable and reversible. Suicide is not.
We applaud the Joint Committee on Public Health and legislators who have worked to expand funding for suicide prevention efforts. Passing this bill would be a slap in the face of those efforts. Suicide contagion is real. Any assisted suicide program will send the message to people in mental distress – old, young, physically ill or not – that suicide is a reasonable answer to life’s problems. It isn’t.
We urge you to give this bill an “ought not to pass.”
Eighteen months ago, if you’d asked me if I supported a doctor assisted suicide bill I would have answered, sure, why not, choice is good. And I would have believed that I could control whether I opt in or not.
Since then, I’ve put two and two together and found that an assisted suicide bill does not add up to a choice I can live with. In fact, if the bill is passed, and the trend continues, the odds of my dying prematurely and without my consent are surprisingly high.
My disability puts me into a category of people who are systematically marginalized by the healthcare system. I share this realm with many poor, elderly, and people of color. I experience inequities in the form of inaccessible exam tables, mammography equipment and weight scales, and discriminatory practices such as when I broke my femur my doctor told me he wouldn’t bother operating because “I don’t walk anymore”; when I didn’t get weighed at my oncologist’s office even though there was a big sign posted on the office wall that read “All patients must be weighed”; I also wasn’t weighed before receiving nine months of chemotherapy even though dosage is determined partially by a patient’s weight. Is this in line with the Hippocratic oath? Take a look at our Crisis Standards of Care to see what’s on the minds of our healthcare industry today.
What does it say when Mass General Hospital, the number 5 rated hospital in the country, after 20 years is still not fully ADA compliant? What does it say about our American culture when it fails to soothe our fears of being left out, not considered, essentially not worth the trouble?
People have always been afraid of disability and the “perceived” loss of dignity that comes with it. In fact, loss of dignity polls as the number one reason for wanting assisted suicide legalized. If loss of dignity means having to lean on a family member or a home health care worker for eating, bathing, and toileting, if it means being inconvenienced and ashamed by incontinence or memory loss, well then at least all of humanity is in the same boat and we can look forward to losing our dignity together because the very act of living means we are aging, our bodies are breaking down and at some point we will be in the need of care from others.
You could say we are all becoming more disabled with each passing day. Maybe we should think about normalizing aging and disability by reevaluating the meaning of the term “loss of dignity.” We could embrace those in need of care by extending access to health and palliative care. We could focus in on easing the inevitability of becoming frail in order to rid people of their guilt of being a burden so they won’t conclude that their best option is to be dead. Many doctors discriminate based on their own fears of being in the need of others and we have proof that they can foist those beliefs onto their patients and patient’s families both overtly and surreptitiously. In other words, the decision to die is not actually ever just the patient’s decision. There is always a doctor involved.
Are we going to allow a false notion of upholding dignity push us to the brink of suicide? Are we serving the greater good by granting doctors, whom we might not even know, the right to decide if a life meets their matrix for saving? I believe that doctors should never be in the business of deciding who they will let die. Never, ever. There are plenty of ways of dying in this world without our doctors’ encouragement. Our doctors should remain cleanly on that side of this argument.
I’m Anita Cameron, Director of Minority Outreach for Not Dead Yet, a national disability rights organization opposed to medical discrimination, healthcare rationing, euthanasia and doctor assisted suicide.
H.2381/S.1384 is dangerous because though these laws are supposed to be for people with six months or less to live, doctors are sometimes wrong about a terminal diagnosis. My mother, while living in Washington state, was determined to be at the end stage of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. I was told her death was imminent, that if I wanted to see her alive, I should get there in two days. She rallied, but was still quite ill, so she was placed in hospice. Her doctor said that her body had begun the process of dying.
Though she survived 6 months of hospice, her doctor convinced her that her body was still in the process of dying, and she moved home to Colorado to die.
My mum didn’t die. She became active in her community and lived almost 12 years!
H.2381/S.1384 will put sick people, seniors and disabled people, especially, at risk due to the view of doctors that disabled people have a lower quality of life, therefore leading them to devalue our lives. Now add race and racial disparities in healthcare to this. Blacks, in particular, receive inferior health care compared to whites in the areas of cardiac care, diabetes, cancer and pain management.
As a Black Latina, I didn’t see assisted suicide as part of my culture. This is borne out in a 2013 Pew study that shows Blacks and Latinos are 65% opposed to doctor assisted suicide and in states where it’s legal, rarely use the program. Doctor assisted suicide proponents tend to be white professional and managerial class folks.
What’s especially dangerous is that in states where it’s legal, if you lose access to healthcare, turning your chronic condition into a terminal one, you can request assisted suicide. It’ll be cheaper to kill you than to care for you.
As long as disability discrimination and racial disparities in healthcare exist, assisted suicide laws like H.2381/S.1384 have no place in Massachusetts. Please vote no on H.2381/S.1384.
When I first heard about this type of legislation, I was all for it. It seemed like an option that I would want for myself or loved ones. But as I studied this issue, the more I learned, the more I realized that there were just too many inequities and risks to vulnerable people. I developed second thoughts. I urge all of you to keep an open mind and really look, look hard at the facts of assisted suicide.
I am sure that you want MA policies to work in the best interest of everyone. Before I became disabled, I was a member of the group that advocates for this — the white, well-educated, and well-off. Now that I am a member of the marginalized, I see things very differently. I recognize the need for the common good. When two-thirds of communities of color are opposed, as well as those of the working class and low-income, and major disability rights organizations, then attention must be paid to this opposition. I am here to say that the interests of a small number of people who want this option should not outweigh the many people whose lives will be impacted, people like me, people with disabilities. I am part of a community that often doesn’t get considered. We get left out, not included, not even thought of. Except to be used as an example of what it is to live without dignity — to be in a wheelchair, incontinent, dependent on others for care. The presumption that one could not possibly have quality of life. That is a fate worse even than death. And that is false.
These are judgments made by people that result in existential fears about what will happen when they age, become sick, and disabled. This devaluation of life, based on an ageist and ableist view of some perfect checklist of functional abilities, is what lies at the heart of this type of legislation. This is what makes people feel like a burden, that we ought to check out, rather than live out our lives.
I co-led a series on End-of-Life issues at my church and was struck by how many of these good-hearted people, who care about social justice, were filled with worry that they would be a “burden” on their loved ones if they couldn’t completely take care of themselves, as they aged or became sick. Or in other words, became disabled. They didn’t want to “take away” money from their family, or ask for help in taking care of themselves. They didn’t want to be “humiliated” and couldn’t imagine how life would be “worth living”. I hope that my presence, as a wheelchair user who does require care, and has a good quality of life, helped remind them that we are all interdependent at different times and in different ways. And this does not lessen the inherent worth and dignity of our lives.
Instead of assisting people in dying, let’s provide medical assistance in living. Let’s meet the real needs of people who are dying, aging, and are disabled. Let’s offer real choices in treatment and palliative care. Let’s provide home and community based care, not an unsafe, miserable life in a nursing home that people fear (and rightly so, as 40% of the Covid deaths occured before the vaccine). Let’s correct health inequities and level the playing field in healthcare, not discriminate against people, deny treatment, and then offer assisted suicide. I recall a time when I was severely ill with septic shock and I was questioned whether I would want life support. Why wouldn’t I want to live? Did the wheelchair alongside me in the Emergency Room influence how people viewed me and my quality of life?
And let’s stop pretending that elders and the disabled are not at risk of abuse. Or that there are adequate safeguards. Or that this is always a peaceful death. Let’s stop the euphemisms. This is suicide. This is not dignity.
Dignity means that people are worthy of respect. Everyone that needs care, at the end of life or throughout their life, deserves that care. Not demoralized for needing care. Or a social pressure to die. Imagine how wearing it is to constantly have to justify one’s existence, to prove that your life is worth living. Legalizing assisted suicide sends the wrong message to people with disabilities —that we are better off dead. People with disabilities, like those confronting terminal illnesses, deserve real compassion, not a hastened death.
Codifying this into law is sanctioning assisted suicide, and a way of promoting it. This is a socially dangerous policy, no matter how well-intentioned. Safeguards are simply not practical. How will they be implemented? Paid for? There will be no realistic way that this will be monitored, just as this does not happen in other states.
The Covid-19 pandemic has caused tremendous loss and tragedy. The majority of those killed were people with disabilities, not just by the virus but by biased responses to people with disabilities, such as forced DNR’s and denial of treatment. The initial Crisis Standards of Care for our state would have placed people with disabilities at the back of the line for treatment. Ableism can and has led to death for people with disabilities. And this bill will threaten their lives, no matter how well intentioned.
Please, this committee must not now focus on making death more accessible. This is not the time to move this socially dangerous policy forward. Massachusetts will be less safe for individuals with disabilities if assisted suicide is legalized, and that is not the compassionate and inclusive state we aspire to be. I urge this committee to vote no on assisted suicide.
Thank you, Ellen Leigh Arlington, MA Second Thoughts Massachusetts
Thank you. Everyone knows that doctors make mistakes, and studies show that 12 to 15 percent of people outlive the six-month hospice benefit for supposedly terminal people. But this year Oregon revealed that only 4 percent of its program participants have lived past six months. This suggests that a substantial number, up to one in 10!, ended their lives prematurely because they trusted their terminal diagnosis. For someone who barely escaped a terminal MISdiagnosis with their life, see the 2011 Boston Globe letter by Jeanette Hall. No one would tolerate any other elective, so-called “medical practice” this deadly.
The 2012 ballot question on assisted suicide shows a class and race/ethnic divide: wealthier towns in favor, more working-class towns, both white and of color, against. Brookline 67% in favor, heavily Latinx Lawrence 69% against. Black and Latinx people have long opposed assisted suicide by more than 2 to 1, and often have a well-earned mistrust of the medical system. These laws make dominant the outlook of a professional class obsessed with individual achievement, autonomy, and status – thus the constant use of the word “dignity,” over the worldview of a working-class that relies on a family support system, connection, and reverence for elders. By undermining the value placed on old, ill, and disabled people, these laws promote writing off people as having too low a quality-of-life.
I would like to point to the overwhelming oppression of people living with disabilities. Mainstream reactions to the death toll of COVID-19 were filled with reassurances like “only old and fragile people are dying, we don’t need to worry.”
People like me serve as examples of better dead than disabled in movies like “Me Before You,” “Whose Life Is It Anyway?,” and “The Sea Inside.”
The Oregon reports show that assisted suicide isn’t about physical pain, it’s about escaping the “existential distress” that some people experience over depending on others, of feeling undignified and like a burden, of being incontinent. As leading purveyor of assisted suicide Lonny Shavelson told the Washington Post in 2016, “It’s almost never about pain. It’s about dignity and control.” Shavelson should know, he is the chair of the newly formed American Clinicians Academy on Medical Aid in Dying.
As someone paralyzed below the shoulders, I am terrified of the prospect of a state law sponsoring people’s suicides as rational responses to disability. Massachusetts should instead fully fund home care and provide world-class palliative care. Equality under the law depends on it.
On Wednesday, September 16, a public hearing was held by the Health Equity Task Force of the Massachusetts Public Health Committee. The legislative website stated that “[t]he virtual hearing is to receive testimony from the public on findings and recommendations that address health disparities for underserved or underrepresented populations during the COVID-19 pandemic, pursuant to the Health Equity Task Force established by section 2 of Chapter 93 of the Acts of 2020.”
John Kelly testified on behalf of Second Thoughts Massachusetts.
Testimony Before MA Health Equity Task Force – Regarding Crisis Standards of Care and Suicide Prevention Services for Disabled People
Thank you. My name is John Kelly and I am the director of Second Thoughts MA: disability rights advocates against assisted suicide. We also oppose policies, actions, and media that demean the lives of disabled people, such as the state’s Crisis Standards of Care (CSC) and lack of attention to suicide prevention services for disabled people.
Under pressure from advocates, the Department of Public Health (DPH) has dropped from its CSC some of its discriminatory criteria for triage decision-making. But it continues to insist on using estimated five-year survival rates against disabled people, who are disproportionately Black and Brown. That’s discriminatory on grounds of both disability and race.
The Office of Civil Rights confirmed this discrimination in its recent settlement with Utah, writing that “Survivability is a factor that can be fraught with speculation, mistaken stereotypes, and assumptions about the quality of life and lifespan of people with disabilities.” In a triage situation, Utah, and thus Massachusetts, can only consider “short-term mortality.” Massachusetts must make an individualized assessment based on the most objective information available. I look forward to a state CSC that values all lives equally.
DPH must also affirm that disabled people are entitled to suicide prevention services. In May, I attended DPH’s annual suicide prevention conference, titled “Building and Sustaining Hope Virtually: Reshaping the Conversation to Reduce Suicide.” I was shocked to hear a presentation wholly centered on assisted suicide, including a timeline of Western thinking on suicide, from Socrates to the French sociologist Emile Durkheim to Jack Kevorkian! The presenter justified their presentation by saying that assisted suicide had been discussed before and “may come back again.”
When the New England Journal of Medicine examined 69 of Kevorkian’s 130 victims, it found that three quarters were not terminally ill, but disabled. Not terminally ill. Disabled, and almost certainly depressed. Some had no physical condition at all. The typical profile was of a woman with a chronic illness or disability who was depressed over a recent life upset.
In Oregon, the reported end-of-life concerns are all about existential distress regarding disability. People ashamed about depending on others, humiliated by feeling like an undignified burden, or traumatized by incontinence get only suicide completion services. So at a suicide prevention conference, the state entity tasked with protecting all of us from suicide promoted a rabid killer of disabled people.
In this state, suicide prevention organizations tacitly support assisted suicide by not taking a position against it. The State’s suicide prevention plan offers almost nothing to us.
DPH should adopt Connecticut’s commitment to preventing disabled people’s suicides. Its plan acknowledges that assisted suicide negatively impacts disabled people because of its operating principle that disability is a “fate worse than death.”
Connecticut’s plan states that: Until recently, the Connecticut Suicide Advisory Board (CTSAB) was considering assisted suicide of the terminally ill as a separate issue from suicide prevention. The active disability community in Connecticut, however, has been vocal on the need for suicide prevention services for people with disabilities. There may be unintended consequences of assisted suicide legislation on people with disabilities. Peace (2012) writes that “Many assume that disability is a fate worse than death. So we admire people with a disability who want to die, and we shake our collective heads in confusion when they want to live.” People with disabilities have a right to responsive suicide prevention services. The CTSAB intends to continue to explore the needs of the disability community for such services.
We disabled people demand responsive suicide prevention services.
To conclude, disabled people in this state, as much as anyone, deserve equal medical care and suicide prevention services. We disabled people are human beings who demand full respect from our state. Thank you.
Thanks to Second Thoughts CT, especially leaders Cathy Ludlum and Stephen Mendelsohn, for your advocacy that made possible Connecticut’s disability-conscious suicide prevention plan!
