Do “Death With Dignity” Advocates Care About People with Disabilities?

Meghan Schrader

By Meghan Schrader

Meghan is an autistic person who is an instructor at E4 - University of Texas (Austin) and an EPC-USA board member.

I don’t think that every assisted suicide supporter is an ableist; I think a lot of people are uninformed about the oppression that the disabled community faces on a daily basis and have no basis for understanding how their agenda could contribute to that oppression. It strikes me that there are assisted suicide advocates out there that earnestly intend to have assisted suicide without expanding it or otherwise harming people with disabilities.

However, assisted suicide is a life and death issue, so trust can only go so far. A lot of “death with dignity” advocates trying to “find common ground” with the disability rights movement say that they care about people with disabilities, but I don’t think that they do. Or, if they do, their concern is mixed with a self-serving motive to eliminate a threat to their agenda. From where I sit as a “Xennial,” someone who came of age in the early 2000s, people who love to virtue signal about how much they care about social justice like to ignore people with disabilities. 

I grew up in the liberal Northeast state of Massachusetts, and so we spent a lot of time talking about racism, but only racism against *ablebodied* BIPOC people. We talked about the women’s rights movement, but the only role models we had were *ablebodied,* neurotypical women. In high school we talked about the rights and experiences of LGBT-identifying persons, but only *ablebodied” LGBT identifying persons. There was no intersectional discussion in which we discussed the needs and experiences of disabled BIPOC or LGBT-identifying persons. We did not learn about disability history, the word “ableism” was never mentioned, we did not learn that there was a dude named Peter Singer working at Princeton who wanted disabled people to die, and when I joined a high school social justice group, we did not talk about disability unless I brought it up.

Because of this cultural invisibility, organizations that see assisted suicide as a civil right have a history of ignoring disabled people. For instance, I do not know what President Biden’s position on assisted suicide is; I hope that he does not support it. However, Xavier Beccerea, Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services does support it and Biden’s healthcare equity team recently tried to prevent the inclusion of disability in its health equity research, because including it would “overwhelm its resources” (Article Link).

The Center for American Progress, which in the past has signalled support for “aid in dying,” (Article Link) finally created a disability rights division in 2018 (Article Link). That leaves me feeling respect and admiration for the disability rights advocates who founded that project, but not much trust in the CFAP.

Similarly, after decades of generally ignoring serious human and civil rights violations against disabled people since its founding in 1920, the assisted suicide supporting ACLU finally created a disability rights division in 2012 (Information Link). Yet, in 2021 the able bodied director of the New York ACLU had the audacity to brag that her organization had been fighting for disability rights “for decades,” so trust her, assisted suicide will turn out fine (Article Link). Well, that’s not true, other then a very small sprinkling of cases here or there, her organization has a horrible record on disability rights. The fact that organizations like that, and able-bodied interlopers from groups like the Death With Dignity National Center are trying to gain inroads into disability rights groups, have started talking about ableism practically yesterday isn’t terribly impressive. 

Assisted suicide is part of a pattern where groups are getting into disability rights when they feel like it helps their cause, with grave consequences for people with disabilities. 

They need to apologize for ignoring disabled people and advocate strenuously for disability justice, then maybe it will be reasonable to trust that you care.