Writing in the Los Angeles Times, James Ricci documents the work of disability rights activists in defeating medically assisted suicide legislation in California. This work is portrayed as conflicting with the constituency’s traditional support for “personal choice and civil rights.”

Many disability rights activists contend that the increasingly cost-conscious healthcare system, especially health maintenance organizations, inevitably would respond to legalized suicide by withholding expensive care from the disabled and terminally ill until they chose to end their lives.

“HMOs are denying access to healthcare and hastening people’s deaths already,” said Paul Longmore, a history professor at San Francisco State and a pioneer in the historical study of disability. “Our concern is not just how this will affect us. Given the way the U.S. healthcare system is getting increasingly unjust and even savage, I don’t think this system could be trusted to implement such a system equitably, or confine it to people who are immediately terminally ill.”

The story examines the coalitions that are being built between disability rights activists, religious groups and medical associations.

There’s a problem with the headline: Assisted suicide attacked from an unlikely front. It’s only unlikely if you haven’t been paying attention. Two more demerits for using words like “afflicted” and “stricken.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 7th, 2007 at 4:44 am and is filed under assisted suicide, law, medicine, politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.  Email This Post