Next year, Washington voters may decide whether to legalize assisted suicide. Already, the argument has begun. Here’s a good piece published in the Olympian by Joelle Brouner, a member of paper’s Diversity Panel and a disability rights activist, arguing why voters should reject legalization–as they did in 1991. Here is a powerful paragraph that nails its target:
Physician-assisted suicide is less about choice or pain management than power. If legalized, physician-assisted suicide will inevitably align the power of the state, big money interests and a broken medical system. If the state sanctions the participation of medical professionals in the killing of patients, the matter transcends the individual who dies. We cannot divorce ourselves from policy decisions made in our name. As citizens, we would all be complicit, by extension, in these deliberate deaths.
Read the whole thing. It is an excellent example of how disability rights activists are making the difference in the assisted suicide debate.