Academia Routinely Dehumanizes Disabled People

Meghan Schrader

By Meghan Schader
Meghan is an instructor at E4 - University of Texas (Austin) and is a member of the EPC-USA board.  

I love a good philosophical discussion, but I am frustrated that academia has treated disabled human beings as walking moral conundrums instead of people. 

I think Alexander Raikin put this problem well when he posted on X,

“For all the talk about ‘cancel culture,’ if you're an academic, you can say whatever you want about people with disabilities. You can say that their lives aren't valuable, that being dead is an improvement. You won't be penalized for these views—it'll help you get published.”

Exactly. This pattern is a personal beserk button.

Now I come to my most recent foray into academia, a commentary I was invited to write for a prestigious academic journal’s special issue on “MAiD” and disability. I was told that the paper was enthusiastically accepted and later asked to make various adjustments. 

For nine months I worked diligently to carefully and open mindedly address each point, with input from the person who had asked me to write the commentary. Up to when I submitted the manuscript incorporating the second round of feedback, publication appeared likely.

But then I received notice that the editors didn’t want my commentary after all. 

On some level, I have to suck it up. Article rejections are part of academia. Nevertheless I think it’s worthwhile to examine the editors’ assertion that the final outcome occurred solely because editing my writing did not result in “changes to the style to better match the style of the other manuscripts in the special issue and the style of manuscripts in the journal in general” and had nothing to do with publication bias. 

I think the feedback I received complicates that conclusion. Regardless of their intent, the editors seemed to want me to use language and make statements that favor the “MAiD” movement’s ideology.

I know that this perception is influenced by my personal biases, but the second round of feedback I received strikes me as possibly being an example of the longstanding pattern of some powerful “MAiD” supporters being insincere when they say that they want to “have a discussion” about  “death with dignity.” They want a discussion, but only one where their ideology is cast in the best possible light and opponents are expected to make concessions that sanitize horrible bigotry. 

For instance, during the second round of feedback the lead editors wanted me to address disabled people who want “MAiD.” All I could offer was a more detailed version of the argument that I made in the first draft of the commentary and on this blog: I empathize with disabled people who would like to “use MAiD,” but the disabled proponents are in the minority and I think it’s common sense that their suicidal ideation/desire for autonomy should not be able to turn the rest of the disabled community into a killable caste. 

The editors also seemed to want me to make statements that I worried would imply that the disabled community is evenly divided on the issue of “MAiD,” which is one of the “MAiD” movement’s favorite canards. The  majority of the disability community opposes “MAiD” and has for decades. So, in addition providing an intersectional analysis of disabled people who do want “MAiD,” I added contextualized quotes from other, more accomplished disability justice opponents of “MAiD,” to establish that while not every disabled person opposes “MAiD,” my perspective is not unique, either. 

One of the editors suggested that I call Peter Singer’s assertion that raping some disabled people is acceptable “controversial.” I think they were ok with my proposed substitution of “callous,” but why has academia conditioned people to suggest adjectives like “controversial” when discussing raping disabled persons? The consensus among ethical people in our culture is that rape is abhorrent, not “controversial.” I think referring to the rape of a disabled person as  “controversial” reinforces our culture’s pattern of treating the horrible abuse of disabled persons as if it weren’t necessarily wrong, even if that wasn’t the editor’s intent. 

In addition to seemingly wanting me to imply that the disabled community is evenly divided on the issue of “MAiD” and refer to the rape of disabled people as “controversial,” the editors wanted me to say that killing disabled children with “MAiD” was hateful “in my opinion.” I added the phrase “in my opinion,”  but I also added contextualized quotes from other, more accomplished disability rights advocates who concur with that assessment. I worried that otherwise my commentary might suggest that my perspective on killing disabled children is unique and that such killings are something that 21st century people should agree to disagree about. 

That concession isn’t appropriate for a personal commentary. I’m a disabled disability justice advocate. Therefore I think that disabled people’s dignity demands that if a policy of killing  able-bodied children from other disenfranchised groups is considered hateful, killing disabled children be regarded as hateful.

Even if bias was not the intent, I am nonplussed by the sanitizing language the journal editors asked me to use in my discussion of raping and killing. I think academic and political debate is usually a very good thing, but there are limits to what responsible people should concede. 

Richard John Neuhaus remarked, “Thousands of medical ethicists and bioethicists, as they are called, professionally guide the unthinkable on its passage through the debatable on its way to becoming the justifiable until it is finally established as the unexceptionable.” 

Yes. So I did everything I could to respond eruditely  to my reviewer’s feedback without becoming part of that process. I am sorry that my commentary was not published by the prestigious journal, but at least I didn’t have to say that raping disabled people is “controversial” or that killing disabled children is only hateful “in my opinion.”

Academia’s insistence on treating disabled people like walking thought experiments is obnoxious;  rhetoric that promotes raping and killing disabled people is oppressive. However limited my own influence may be, that’s why I’ve written blogs and X threads that say, “Oh, you want to have a nice, polite discussion about killing disabled people, eh? Here’s a picture of your book in a toilet!” 

Disabled people aren’t “porn” for scholars’ intellectual vulgarity sessions. We are not obliged to accept abuse from academics who wish to debate the merits of raping and killing us at conferences in posh hotels. Not using disabled people’s personhood as an intellectual plaything is one of the least things society could do for people with disabilities.  

Author Note 1: For an incisive, more comprehensive commentary on resisting the “MAiD” movement’s framing in discussions about assisted suicide and eugenics, please read disability policy analyst Gabrielle Peters’s article “Acceding To MAiD Proponent’s Framing Excludes Abolition As a Potential Solution” in the American Journal of Bioethics. 

Author Note 2: For clarification of what I mean when I say that Peter Singer said that raping some disabled people is acceptable, read this blog post.

Peter Singer, My Deathbed, And Why I Can’t Trust ‘MAiD’

Meghan Schrader

By Meghan Schrader  

Meghan is an instructor at E4 - University of Texas (Austin) and is a member of the EPC-USA board. 

One of the reasons that I decided to go back to school to get a Masters degree in Special Education instead of getting a PH.D in disability studies was so that I could stop thinking about Peter Singer so often. I was deeply shocked upon finding his “let’s kill disabled babies” screeds in college, and a lot of my musicology/disability studies research on how the history of eugenics influences contemporary narratives about euthanasia and disability was me trying to understand why turn of the twenty first century society had allowed such a hateful bully to have a platform. My inquiry into this matter led to published research on how pro eugenic narratives about disabled people and euthanasia were communicated in film music, and I loved my research. But, after I recovered from my first bout of psychotic depression, it occurred to me that if I didn’t refocus some of my intellectual energies, I might one day be in my 90s on my deathbed, ranting that Peter Singer was a scumbag. And a hospice nurse would say, “Yes, yes, dear, he’s dead now; he’s been dead for many years.” And then I would pass away peacefully, secure in the knowledge that Peter Singer was dead.

This intellectual entanglement might seem sort of ridiculous, and be kind of unhealthy, but I think my deep anger is understandable. Because in addition to comparing disabled people to chimpanzees and saying that disabled babies should be killed to contain healthcare premiums, Singer also thinks that it’s acceptable to rape some of us. 

In 2017 a therapist named Anna Stubblefield was arraigned on charges of having sexually assaulted D.J., a disabled man with cerebral palsy and cognitive impairment. She claimed that the sexual contact was consensual, but D.J.’s family disagreed. In a New York Times editorial about the case, Peter Singer and his colleague Jeff McMahan wrote:

“If we assume that [the alleged victim, D.J.] is profoundly cognitively impaired, we should concede that he cannot understand the normal significance of sexual relations between persons or the meaning and significance of sexual violation. . . . In that case, he is incapable of giving or withholding informed consent to sexual relations; indeed he may lack the concept of consent altogether.

This does not exclude the possibility that he was wronged by Stubblefield, but it makes it less clear what the nature of the wrong might be. It seems reasonable to assume that the experience was pleasurable to him . . . it seems that if Stubblefield wronged or harmed him, it must have been in a way that he is incapable of understanding and that affected his experience only pleasurably.”

Kevin Mintz. A disability studies scholar with cerebral palsy, published an article about the Stubblefield case in the journal Disability and Society titled “Ableism, Ambiguity and the Stubblefield Case,” in which he notes:

“Philosophers Jeff McMahan and Peter Singer also marginalize and objectify D.J. in their op-ed in The New York Times. In particular, they argue that if D.J. truly is severely intellectually disabled, then it is not clear what harm was done to him if Stubblefield did, in fact, sexually assault him. Their logic is flawed because it supposes that for someone to be harmed, they have to actually perceive the harm being done to them. This would also imply that sex crimes against anyone who is incapable of perceiving harm are not explicitly harmful. What would that mean for cases involving children who might not understand when harm is being done to them, the unconscious, or the intoxicated?

As a professional in the field of human sexuality, I find this conclusion appalling and dangerous. There is not enough research on the effects of trauma in these kinds of cases to be able to definitively determine whether such assaults are or are not harmful in their own right.”

Yes: according to Singer and McMahon, DJ could not have the same human reaction to trauma as a neurotypical, able-bodied person, and therefore it was ok if Stubblefield used him as a sex toy. 

Oregon assisted suicide model proponents’ tolerance for people like Singer is one of the major reasons for why I do not support the Oregon model. What does publishing Singer and MacMahon’s column say about the New York Times, which loudly favors “MAiD” and also published an article saying that a man shooting his Alzheimer’s affected wife in the head was a “love story”? The Completed Life Initiative gave an “End of Life Pioneer” award to Connecticut “MAiD” activist Lynda Bluestien just a month after it gave Singer a platform at its Faith Sommerfield Memorial Lecture in 2023. Why should disabled people trust the judgment or intentions of a movement that rubs elbows with a man who thinks raping cognitively impaired people is ok? 

I realize that advocacy sometimes requires working with people with whom we might not agree, and I do not like everything every fellow euthanasia opponent does or believes, but I swear to God, none of the “MAiD” opponents that I work with has ever said that raping or killing people is ok. 

Alas, mainstream “MAiD” advocates are not alone in platforming people like Peter Singer. Singer has been referred to as “the most influential living philosopher.” As I’ve mentioned, the coercion I experienced in the Special Education system led me to want to help prevent even one person from being coerced into assisted suicide, but the second major disability justice reason why I cannot support the Oregon model is because so many people in this world love Peter Singer. A world that doesn’t know any better than to platform a man who thinks that raping disabled people is ok has not earned the responsibility to regulate death. 

Author Note: I’ve discussed my struggles with unfortunate, involuntary feelings of kind of “wanting” Peter Singer to die so that he can’t hurt disabled people anymore. However, that’s not a suggestion to harm Peter Singer. It’s wrong to kill people, it wouldn’t do the disabled community’s broader situation any good, and it’s not worth getting lost in the criminal justice system. 

Previous articles by Meghan Schrader (Articles Link). 

 

Canada is not better than the United States

Meghan Schrader

By Meghan Schrader

With the exception of those who have blithely stated their intention to kill members of a marginalized group because they are members of that group, such as people like Peter Singer, Thaddeus Mason Pope, Christopher Riddle and some other “MAiD” supporters, and members of hate groups like the KKK, I don’t choose my friends and associates based on ideology. I have friends and family from all over the political spectrum that have been good to me. I also think it is imperative that people from all over the political spectrum unite to correct the serious problems that disabled people face, sort of like people might unite if someone’s house were on fire.

So, I don’t generally comment on political candidates or parties. But there have been a lot of policies being proposed or implemented lately that my experience indicates would be very bad for disabled people. I feel like my role as a disability justice advocate requires me to comment on these policies. So, I have had to talk about politics a little bit. In that vein, this post is intended as a disability justice response to Americans who are currently thinking that Canada might be a nice place to live.

In my opinion there are some really, really bad policies being implemented in the United States right now; I discuss what I think are destructive disability rights policies at length in my “Opposition to Recent/Proposed Disability Policy Changes Is Not “Hysteria” post. 

In my experience, ableism is not unique to this administration or to the Republican Party, but from my perspective it’s as though this administration got a list of almost every ableist thing it could possibly do and shouted, “Leeroy Jenkins!” And, Conservative-identitying members of this administration are the ones leading efforts to implement the aforementioned policies, so it’s justifiable for people to talk about ableist and/or generally prejudiced conservative policies and ideas.

Nevertheless, it bothers me to see many Americans, especially Americans who identify as politically progressive, holding up comparatively leftist Canada as a place to move to and extolling the wisdom of its leaders. Although I believe that many of the policies that this administration has championed are unethical and prejudiced, Canada is also implementing unethical and prejudiced policies; it is NOT any better than the United States, at least not for people with disabilities.

If one compares the disability policies that this administration has implemented to Canada’s, there are disturbing parallels. For instance, President Trump signed an executive order making it easier to institutionalize people with severe mental illnesses like I have experienced. This is horrible, but did Canada not do the same thing when it passed the More Beds Better Care Act, which allows health authorities to forcibly transfer disabled and elderly people to institutions far away from their families? The prevailing worldview among members of the mainstream disability studies/advocacy communities that I interact with is that this administration’s policies have made America’s issues with systemic racism worse, but did Canada’s government not ignore the majority of its indigenous community that asserted that Canada’s healthcare system was rife with systemic racism and “Track 2 MAiD” would make that worse? I’ve observed some disabled friends who identify as LGBT talking about moving to Canada, and although I can’t speak to their experiences, I worry that Canada would not be a better environment for them, given that Canada is aggressively suggesting “MAiD” to disabled people who identify with any gender or sexual orientation. People from across my Facebook feed are expressing concern that this administration has implemented policies that seem designed to impose its worldview on everyone, but has Canada’s government not shut down hospices that decline to participate in “MAiD”? I know from personal experience that America’s policies often further systemic ableism, but at least we passed the Americans With Disabilities Act in 1990. Canada passed “ADA lite” legislation in 2019, and has set a goal of the law being fully implemented in 2040. Current Prime Minister Carney didn’t even bother to appoint a disability justice minister and is continuing Trudeau’s pattern of starving and killing people with disabilities. Is that the world that Canada’s admirers want for Americans with disabilities?

As I’ve noted, it seems that people who admire Canada the most tend to identify as political progressives. Unfortunately, Canada’s current Center-Left government has taken ableism to a lethal extreme, and in my experience USA citizens from that political contingent have not collectively earned the disabled community’s trust either.

For instance, one of the most aggressively ableist progressive-identifying people I have ever met, the guidance counselor who attempted to force me to drop out of high school because I was a Special Education student, posted on the public part of his Facebook page:

“I just listened to Prime Minister Trudeau’s speech on Canada’s response to Trump’s tariffs. He would, if Trump follows through, concomitantly place tariffs on U.S. goods. He spoke like a true, sensible and sane leader. I was proud for the Canadian people and shame for our country’s leadership…It seems that if more people who typically vote democratic did not sit it out in 2024 things might have been different. But we must move on.”

No. Prime Minister Trudeau was not a “true, sensible” leader. He helped create a world where disabled people are starving and killing themselves. It scares and offends me to observe people like that guidance counselor praising Trudeau as a “true, sensible leader;” I think that’s a sign that Canada is correctly controlled by people like that guidance counselor: people who virtue signal about how progressive they are while treating disabled people of all backgrounds like garbage.

With regard to how attitudes toward Canada intersect with the right to die debate, the attitudes of mainstream US “MAiD” leaders toward Canada are concerning. As noted, Compassion and Choices leaders Kevin Diaz and Bernadette Nunley’s article on the differences between US and Canadian “MAiD” laws declined to criticize Canada’s approach. Also, I don’t mean to be creepy, but I noticed that Compassion and Choices National Campaign Director Tim Appleton posted this comment about Justin Trudeau on his BlueSky account:

“After watching this, I cannot imagine #JustinTrudeau leaving the world stage. Canada, America, and the world need him, now more than ever.”

The fact that Tim thinks that Canada, America and the world needs Justin Trudeau, even after Trudeau allowed policies that lead to disabled people starving, being homeless and dying early deaths strikes me as indicating that the American “MAiD” movement’s outreach to people with disabilities is largely performative.

Tim also posted a quote from Canadian Prime Minister Carney asserting that this administration’s tariffs were an indication that the 80 year period in which the United States “formed alliances rooted in mutual trust and respect” was over. I agree that this administration’s tariffs are ridiculous, but Carney has no right to lecture anyone about “trust and respect.” His party gives disabled people no reason to afford his government any level of trust and Carney treats his disabled citizens with extreme disrespect. Tim might respond that his posts aren’t meant to communicate agreement with everything Canada does, but Canada’s leaders have created an environment where disabled people are starving and killing themselves. Compassion and Choices likes to frame itself as part of the political left, but praising such a country doesn’t seem very progressive or responsible to me. Would C&C’s leaders praise Vladimir Putin? Or apartheid South Africa? By equivocating about and praising Canada, C&C’s leaders are reinforcing the message that its disability policies aren’t contemptible and that it would be acceptable for America to copy them.

My perspective that Canada is not better than the United States is not unique. When Canada was passing Bill C-7 to expand “MAiD” to people with disabilities, a disabled Canadian X user named Tweedy Mutant posted:

“Let me talk to Americans for a second about #KillBillC7. Look, I grew up in the US, so I know that Canada holds a special place in the hearts of US leftists, but the Canada that people threaten to move to every election and the ACTUAL country of Canada are different places. In cases of discrimination, the ACTUAL country of Canada offers completely inadequate "protection" through a slow and retraumatizing Human Rights Tribunal process riddled with barriers that disproportionately impact disabled ppl, making it an ineffectual option for redress.

Oh and the threat to move to Canada the next time the GOP takes the White House? Good luck if you're disabled. In the ACTUAL country of Canada, would-be immigrants can be denied on the grounds of disability. Furthermore, the ACTUAL country of Canada does not provide disabled ppl with adequate supports to live -- and instead of ensuring better quality-of-life, Parliament passed Bill C7, which removes important safeguards on medical assistance in dying.

The ACTUAL country of Canada has a long history of institutionalization and sterilization. The ACTUAL country of Canada passed a toothless version of the ADA (the ACA) 19 years AFTER the US. (Do the math: we got our "ADA lite" in 2019!)”

Disabled Canadian X user Sarah Colero stated:

“The treatment of developmentally disabled folks by the United States does not take away from the active disabled eugenics in Canada in which the UN CRPD called out earlier this year. You can maplewash all you want, Canada is actively killing disabled folks including Autistics.”

American disability justice leader Imani Barbarin responded to a post from a Canadian expressing derision for the USA’s current policies by asserting: 

“Your healthcare system has been essentially euthanizing disabled people en masse.”

Indeed. As a disabled person, Canada doesn’t sound like a place that I would want to live.

Disabled people in the United States do not need leaders like Canada’s in charge of our lives. We need people from across the political spectrum to listen to us and create policies that help us thrive, not make us so oppressed that we die.

The Netherlands already allows infant euthanasia.

This article was published by National Review online on August 25, 2025.

Wesley Smith

By Wesley J Smith

An article in the Daily Mail sounds the alarm that permitting infant euthanasia — i.e., infanticide — is under serious consideration in Canada:

Canada‘s assisted suicide laws have continued rapidly expanding in recent years, with a group of doctors now pushing for disabled newborn babies to be euthanized. . . . As assisted deaths have become a major part of Canada’s health care system, the Quebec College of Physicians suggested legalizing euthanasia for infants born severely ill.

Canada has jumped so enthusiastically into the euthanasia abyss that I have little doubt that infanticide will eventually be allowed there. It’s only logical. If killing is an acceptable answer to suffering, why limit the killing to adults?

Besides, as the story briefly notes, the Netherlands already allows doctors to lethally inject disabled and terminally ill babies. There is even a bureaucratic checklist to guide the infanticide known as the “Groningen Protocol.” Here is what I wrote some 20 years ago when the protocol was first released:

The publishing of the Groningen Protocol isn’t designed to end the secret that is not a secret. It is intended to legitimize eugenic infanticide and move it from a crime tolerated by the, oh, so tolerant Dutch, to outright legality. In other words, the last vestige of protection left in the Netherlands against infanticide — that is, the technical illegality of killing babies in the Netherlands — is to be stripped away, including the protection against the killing of disabled infants not dependent on intensive care for survival.

In a more righteous world, allowing infanticide would make the Netherlands a pariah nation, but we have become morally stunted in the West, so what’s a little baby killing among friends? Many (but certainly, not all) in bioethics believe that killing babies that don’t suit us is morally acceptable — and not just Peter Singer. Indeed, the protocol was even published without criticism in the New England Journal of Medicine.

So, let us not be shocked by Canada’s threatening infanticide rumblings. Instead, let us look clear eyed at the policies that logically follow from eliminating suffering by eliminating the sufferer, and turn back from the metastasizing euthanasia cancer before we lose what remains of our moral compass.

Previous articles about this topic:

• Canada's euthanasia lobby is pushing for child euthanasia (Link). 
• Australian Human Rights Commission pushes Assisted Suicide for Children. (Link).
• The euthanasia lobby is pushing for child and infant euthanasia (Link).
• Canadian children may be euthanized with or without parental consent (Link).

Peter Singer endorses elder suicide.

This article was published by National Review online on April 14, 2025

Wesley Smith

By Wesley J. Smith

Peter Singer, the internationally influential emeritus bioethics professor from Princeton, is known as a moral philosopher — which in his case is an oxymoron. Not only has he repeatedly endorsed the moral propriety of infanticide, but he has also yawned at bestiality and suggested experimenting on cognitively disabled people rather than animals if they are not “persons,” among other ethically depraved opinions.

Singer and another philosophy professor — Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek — just took to the opinion pages of the New York Times to endorse geriatric suicide. It seems a noted 90-year-old psychologist named Daniel Kahneman committed assisted suicide last year at one of Switzerland’s death clinics. Kahneman wasn’t seriously ill or debilitated but feared the infirmities that he believed were coming, so off to Switzerland he flew. Singer and Lazari0-Radek heartily approve.

Peter Singer

Before Kahneman killed himself — and knowing what he planned — Singer and Lazari-Radek interviewed him on their podcast. At his request, the interview did not discuss the looming suicide — Kahneman died just a few days later. But Singer and Lazari-Radek noticed he wasn’t seriously ill or debilitated. From “There’s a Lesson to Learn from Daniel Kahneman’s Death:”

Despite his advanced age, he was still capable of research and writing and could still enlighten audiences on how to make better decisions. Apart from his intellectual gifts, he was healthy enough to participate in friendship and family life. Why did none of this give him sufficient reason to continue to live?

Do you see the problem with that attitude? Do the philosophers not understand how bigoted and anti-intrinsic dignity of life their relativistic assumptions are about when a life is worth continuing? It is as if one must earn the privilege of remaining alive and is very close in substance to the geriatric disdain expressed by the bioethicist Ezekiel Emanuel when he wrote in The Atlantic that he wanted to die at age 75 because “living too long is also a loss. It renders many of us, if not disabled, then faltering and declining.”

No matter. Singer and Lazari-Radek think that being made dead when one wants to die is “dignity:”

Professor Kahneman signaled concern that if he did not end his life when he was clearly mentally competent, he could lose control over the remainder of it and live and die with needless “miseries and indignities.” One lesson to learn from his death is that if we are to live well to the end, we need to be able to freely discuss when a life is complete, without shame or taboo. Such a discussion may help people to know what they really want. We may regret their decisions, but we should respect their choices and allow them to end their lives with dignity.

Of course, it is important to talk freely about wanting to commit suicide. Indeed, anyone in that situation should — so they can be helped with unequivocal suicide prevention and other interventions. Besides, sometimes “shame,” “taboo,” and worry about stigma can save lives if they prevent people from doing the deadly deed.

And get this. At the bottom of the column, the Times added this addendum:

If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.

What a sick joke. One way to help suicidal people continue living is to not publish pro-suicide opinion pieces!

Sometimes really loving someone means unequivocally supporting them in living — not in suicide — even when they can’t see a way forward themselves. But that is not the “lesson” taught by Singer and Lazari-Radek’s column. Rather, their opinions — and its publishing by one of the world’s most influential newspapers — promote the West’s devolution into a pro-suicide culture. The victims of such a nihilistic mindset will be the elderly, people with disabilities, the mentally ill, and the seriously sick in an ever-widening swath of premature deaths.

Honoring Diane Coleman. Founder of Not Dead Yet.

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

Diane Coleman

I have written and published previous articles honoring Diane Coleman, the founder of Not Dead Yet. The most recent article was written by Clay Risen and published in the New York Times on November 20, 2024. 

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)