Stephen Drake posted an excerpt and link on Not Dead Yet to here. I’m almost afraid to use words after reading so powerful a blog entry as you have done. (I’m too ill, CFS/ME, to do a blog. I use comments, mainly on NDY and a small newsletter, a monthly report, to artists who are disabled in a small support group since April 1985.)

Other disability/human rights activists have pointedly asked, What other group is urged to kill themselves? Recently, on Stephen Drake’s list of entries on NDY is the story of Iraq War vet Tomas Young, the calling him of a “hero” by Phil Donahue, and the media bandwagon, for promising to do “assisted suicide” in the “next few months” in a hospice (I never before heard of a hospice, which has agreed to allow Young to starve himself, for someone not “terminal”). He is an example of the failure you mention in your piece. The society bemoans the suicides of U.S. Iraq and Afghanistan war vets, yet the severely disabled Young is cheered to death.

Again, thank you. Some of us sure make beautiful noise.

I think it very rarely profits any exchange of opinions to expound upon the “true motivations” of the opposite part. If you want others to respect your capacity for independent self-determination – regardless of what “impairment” or “disability” they might assign to you – you should accord them the similar courtesy, and assume that their stated motivations are, in fact, genuine.

I have no difficulty at all imaging a condition where my life – even with the finest, tenderest care and assistance that anyone could wish for, even surrounded by friends and loved ones – would be such continuous agony and tribulation, and any moments of pleasure or meaning so vanishingly few and far between, that I would prefer death and oblivion to continued life.
As an atheist, I believe that my life is fundamentally my own property to do with as I will – including to end it if I choose to do so, and that it is morally and ethically right to assist another person in doing this if that is their free, informed decision. I believe that mastery over your own life and existence to be a fundamental expression of personal dignity – and that people may be able to face and endure more pain and trials than they could have imagined if they know that option to end it will always remain available to them; rather than feeling they must take this step prematurely to avoid being deprived of the choice later.

And I will never, ever, so help me God, support any legalization of assisted suicide or euthanasia.

Because, as RCR writes, there are – or rather were – countless Amandas out there that didn’t have her personal strength and support network, and that had their lives – lives that still had the capacity for meaning, and joy, and hope – cut short by an attitude so callously cynical that it doesn’t even deserve the name of paternalism. With all the people out there who worry about being a “burden” on their family, their friends, or society, we can’t afford to allow even the tiniest shred of a hint that euthanasia is a valid response to these worries or pressures, or that the quality of their lives is to be weighed on a scale against the cost of maintaining that life. The profound injustice done to those patients denied the chance to end a life that has become meaningless to them is the price that must be paid in order to avoid the far greater injustice – and the potentially corrosive effects upon society as a whole – of a system that formalizes, regulates, and thereby, if only implicitly, normalizes a choice that should only ever be made in extremis, and never, ever, as a consequence of outside pressure.

This blog post barely scratches the surface on what’s wrong with Amanda’s treatment.