Police probe ‘assisted suicide’ of UK rugby star
October 18th, 2008
Parents defend his decision
From the [UK] Times, [UK] Guardian and BBC News:
Police are investigating the death last month of a promising young rugby player who had been injured earlier in a training accident. Dan James died after traveling to a Swiss euthanasia clinic.
His parents, Mark and Julie James, defended his his decision to take his own life, saying that their son was “an intelligent young man of sound mind” who was “not prepared to live what he felt was a second-class existence.”
James was said to have been destined for a professional playing career when he was left paralyzed from the chest down after his spine was dislocated in a training session in 2007.
James is believed to be one of the youngest Britons to have traveled to Switzerland for an assisted suicide, a practice that is outlawed in the UK.
See earlier post here.
See also: Why my son had the right to die, by the mother of Dan James — [UK] Times
(Times photo)
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October 22nd, 2008 at 2:07 pm
I feel that I must respond to the unbalanced, misguided reporting of the ‘assisted suicide’ of Dan James. Every report that I have read portrays spinal cord injury as a tragedy and the lives of those acquiring such an injury as not worth living. As a person who has acquired a spinal cord injury 23 years ago and who has a three year old son who might one day read such accounts, I am offended and angry.
Why couldn’t the reports include descriptions of the lives of the many, many people who have acquired a spinal cord injury who live very fulfilling, happy lives? Why couldn’t the report be balanced out with research that shows that having acquired a spinal cord injury, and other impairments need not necessarily lead to ‘a lingering death’. Research shows that, although disabled people are swimming against the tide of disabilism, many do manage to attain a good quality of life, find employment, become parents and contribute to society in many different ways.
The following two quotes from men who have acquired a spinal cord injury when they were young highlights how such injuries do not necessarily lead to impoverished lives.
Acquiring a spinal cord injury has been described by (Oliver 1984) as the best thing that had ever happened to him and that incurring a SCI gave him “an alternative possibility” of who he could become. He goes on to say;
“Forty years later, I am a professor of disability studies, I have one marriage behind me and I am happily married again. I have grandchildren and have been all over the world. I have had a good life. I have no complaints.” In Cole (2004)
Incurring a SCI for (Finkelstein 2002), meant one destiny being left behind and replaced with another more fulfilling, more rewarding and more human than he could ever have hoped for, that resulted in;
“an amazing bouquet of surprises-– entirely unpredictable friendships, world-wide travel, diverse careers, loving relationships in a delightful family, and the honour of being given a little role in helping to turn one small but enduring part of the world upside down” (Finkelstein 2002).
Most of the newspapers monopolized on the family quote that Dan was unwilling to live as a ‘second class citizen’. What makes people who have acquired a spinal cord injury into ‘second class citizen’ is the prejudice, policies and practices that we are subjected to, not a spinal cord injury.
Impairment will always be around, distorted and misguided reporting and the prejudice that this reinforces, need not be.
Disgusted, Harvey Cowe
Resources:
Oliver in conversation with Cole, J. (2004). Still lives: Narratives of Spinal Cord Injury. MIT Press, London.
Finkelstein, V. In ‘Whose History ???’ (Keynote address at the Disability History Week, Birmingham, 10th June 2002)