Testimony of Diane Coleman, J.D. and Carol Gill, Ph.D. Most proponents of physician-assisted suicide would say that a representative of the disability community does not really belong on this panel today. They would say that physician-assisted suicide pertains to people who are terminally ill, not disabled. The concerns of people with disabilities were similarly dismissed as irrelevant in the context of withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment or "passive euthanasia."
Nevertheless, courts did not carefully protect non-terminal people with disabilities from a too hasty "final exit." Indeed, court after court declared that people with disabilities were essentially the same as people with terminal illnesses, stating that routine disability-related health care was artificially prolonging life, or that it did not matter how extended the individual's life-expectancy might be if their quality of life rendered their life "meaningless." This occurred in numerous appelate court cases involving people with quadriplegia, often locked away in nursing homes without hope of in-home support services, and it even occurred in a case involving a woman with cerebral palsy. No court, or professional whose judgment the courts respected, examined the suicidal feelings of Elizabeth Bouvia, David Rivlin, Larry McAfee, Hector Rodas or Kenneth Bergstedt. All courts attributed the individual's desire to die to their physical disabilities per se rather than to events and circumstances in their lives, such as a miscarriage, loss of spouse and confinement to nursing homes. All courts superficially concluded that the individual's despair was not suicidal, not treatable or deserving of appropriate intervention. These individuals were granted a so-called "right to die" without being offered adequate supports for living. These highly publicized cases are the tip of an unexplored iceberg, one that proponents of physician-assisted suicide prefer to ignore. But the legal foundation for applying physician-assisted suicide to non-terminal people with disabilities is already firmly entrenched in our judicial system, and disabled people are beginning to feel that we are riding on the Titanic. People with disabilities do not have adequate protection from either the courts or disability organizations. The courts have consistently excused parents who have murdered children with disabilities. A woman in Wisconsin escaped sentencing after admittedly starving her son with cerebral palsy to death. She said she was responding to family pressure and the message of a T.V. show on euthanasia. A west coast mother recently killed her brain injured non-verbal teenaged daughter. The judge said her actions were understandable, that other parents could be expected to react in the same way. He sentenced her to community service. Meanwhile, disability watchdog organizations are losing funding. There have never been enough of these to serve people with disabilities adequately; now many are forced to shut down.
Exposure draft of the Medical Services (Dying with Dignity) Bill 2014 Submission 4 - Attachment 1