Risen begins:
Diane Coleman, a fierce advocate for disability rights who took on Dr. Jack Kevorkian, the
right-to-die movement and the U.S. health care system, which she charged was
responsible for devaluing the lives of Americans like her with physical and
mental impairments, died on Nov. 1 at her home in Rochester, N.Y. She was 71.
Her
sister Catherine Morrison said the cause was sepsis.
Risen explains what Diane did before founding Not Dead Yet:
Ms. Coleman was born with muscular spinal atrophy, a disorder that
affected her motor neurons. She was using a wheelchair by 11, and doctors
expected her to die before adulthood.
Instead,
she blossomed, graduating as valedictorian from her high school and receiving a
joint J.D.-M.B.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1981.
It was only after several years of working as a
consumer protection lawyer that she shifted her energies to disability rights,
joining a flourishing movement that was
pushing for anti-discrimination laws at every level of government, including
improvements on transit and in buildings.
Ms. Coleman was a member of Adapt, considered
one of the most militant disability rights groups. She participated in
scores of protests, blocking the entrances to buildings where conferences were
held or government offices were housed. She was arrested more than 25
times.
Risen explains why Diane focused on preventing assisted suicide:
In the 1990s, she shifted her attention yet again, to assisted
suicide and the right-to-die movement. Though the movement was aimed at people
with terminal illnesses, legislation in many states expanded to include people
with significant disabilities.
Gifted
with a dark sense of humor, in 1996 she founded a group called Not
Dead Yet, a reference to a memorable scene in the movie
“Monty Python and the Holy Grail” in which a man tries to pass off an infirm —
but very much alive — relative to a man collecting dead bodies.
“To
put it bluntly, she was blunt,” Jim Weisman, a disability rights lawyer, said
in an interview.
Working on a shoestring budget, Ms. Coleman
organized protests against right-to-die legislation, became a regular guest on
television news programs and testified four times before Congress.
Diane explained why assisted suicide threatened people with disabilities:
At the core of her critique was the argument that the idea of a “right
to die” was evidence of how little society valued people like her and a warning
that the health care system was broken.
“It
is already possible in some states for impoverished disabled, elderly and
chronically ill people to get assistance to die,” she told the House Judiciary
Committee in 1996, “but impossible for them to get shoes, eyeglasses and tooth
repair.”
Diane challenged Peter Singer and Jack Kevorkian. Risen writes:
Not Dead Yet showed up at Princeton University
in 1999 after the university announced the hiring of Peter Singer, an
Australian philosopher who had argued for voluntary euthanasia for people with
disabilities.
Never
shy with a quote, Ms. Coleman told the British newspaper The Independent that
Mr. Singer was “a public advocate of genocide, and the most dangerous man on
earth.”
Her
biggest target was Dr. Kevorkian, who became a household name in the 1990s and
early 2000s for assisting patients in ending their lives. She sent protesters
to his house outside Detroit, and she reveled in his 1999 conviction for
second-degree murder after he helped a man with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis
end his life.
“It’s
the ultimate form of discrimination to offer people with disabilities help to
die,” she told The New York Times in 2011,
“without having offered real options to live.”
Risen finishes the article by recounting some of Diane's many accomplishments:
When she was 6, Diane was diagnosed with
muscular dystrophy, which doctors later said was actually muscular spinal
atrophy and would require surgery. The adoption agency told the Colemans that
they could send her back. They declined.
Instead,
they encouraged her to work hard in school and to attend college, at a time
when many people with disabilities did not. She graduated with a degree in
psychology from the University of Illinois in 1976, and she received law and
business degrees from U.C.L.A. five years later.
She
spent eight years working for the California Department of Corporations, where
she focused on consumer fraud. She attended her first protest in 1985, against
the lack of wheelchair lifts on Los Angeles buses, and she joined Adapt a year
later.
In
1989, she moved to Nashville, where she developed plans for an independent
living facility for people with disabilities. She continued that work after
moving to Chicago in 1996, the same year she founded Not Dead Yet.
Ms.
Coleman’s first marriage, to Michael Yester, ended in divorce. She later
married Stephen Drake. Along with her sister Catherine, he survives her, as
does another sister, Denise Coleman.
Ms.
Coleman and Mr. Drake moved to Rochester in 2008, to be close to his family. By
then the muscles controlling her breathing had begun to weaken, and she was
using a ventilator.
Still,
she remained the chief executive of Not Dead Yet until her death, insisting
that her fight was not just for people with disabilities but for everyone.
“The
disability community is the canary in the coal mine,” she told The Village
Voice in 1996. “This assisted suicide-euthanasia issue is a test for our
nation. If we as disabled, chronically ill or terminally ill people are
declared better off dead, who will be next?”
More articles honoring Diane Coleman:
- The Great Diane Coleman has died. She has left an amazing legacy (Link)
- Not Dead Yet comments on the passing of Diane Coleman (Link)
