If you went by all the puff-pieces for "assisted suicide" in the liberal media, you might think that everyone who might be involved supports the move to push euthanasia into law in Britain.
But the truth is very different. Activists with disabilities are speaking out against the legalisation of assisted suicide and are warning that vulnerable people risk “being devalued to death” as Labour MP Kim Leadbeater attempts to introduce assisted suicide.
Leadbeater’s assisted suicide bill has led to an outcry among a number of major disability rights groups and activists who are continuing to express their fervent opposition to the move.
Actress and activist Liz Carr, who described the prospect of legalising assisted suicide in the UK as “terrifying” in her BBC documentary Better Off Dead?, shared her fears about its effect on vulnerable people.
She said “For many disabled people the assumption that we’d be ‘Better Off Dead’ is something that we get used to hearing. We do not believe that any safeguard can adequately protect us from coercion, abuse, mistake and discrimination. We believe that if assisted suicide is legalised, disabled, ill and older people risk being devalued to death”.
‘What’s to say I won’t be eligible for a death sentence, and pushed into it?’
Fears of coercion are very real for Dermot Devlin, founder of the disabled rights and disability blog My Way Access, who told Politics UK he is “scared” about being forced into an assisted suicide through the new Bill.
“With my increased chronic pain, respiratory failure and mobility issues, what’s to say I won’t be eligible for a death sentence, and pushed into it?”, he said.
Disability rights activist George Fielding echoed Devlin and Carr’s concerns, stating that legalising assisted suicide would “lead to coercion and pressure on disabled individuals to end their lives prematurely”. He said “In a society that often devalues and marginalises disabled people, it is not difficult to imagine scenarios where individuals feel like they are a burden to their families or caregivers. The mere existence of legally assisted suicide could send the message that ending one’s life is an acceptable solution to these feelings rather than addressing the underlying societal attitudes and lack of support”.
As for the medical experts, no doctors’ groups in the UK support changing the law to introduce assisted suicide or euthanasia. The British Medical Association, the Royal College of General Practitioners, the Royal College of Physicians, the British Geriatric Society, and the Association for Palliative Medicine have all rejected the proposals.