The Impact of Assisted Suicide Coverage

Katherine Araniello (www.araniello-art.com)

My concern is the ideology that assisted suicide coverage perpetuates in today’s society. Assisted Suicide is equated with physical disability. Most able-bodied people’s worst fear is that they might become physically disabled through an accident or terminal illness. This perpetuates the already existing stigma that if people are dependent on others as a result of being physically disabled they have no quality of life. It is therefore natural for the general public to be understanding and sympathetic towards those wishing to terminate their lives by assisted suicide. The cause is fear of immobility and the effect is to terminate life.

The debate for me is not about taking away an individual’s right to die, I just want people to be aware of all the choices available. This would include being made aware of the social model of disability. The social model looks at the individual person rather than their impairment. A person with any type of disability should have the right to be a fully participating member of society and changes in society’s attitude and structure are part of the process. The impetus is ensuring that people with disabilities have all the necessary support tailored to their individual needs so that they can have a good quality of life irrespective of their physical impairment.

The problem for me is the negative impact that coverage of assisted suicide has on disabled people and the implication it gives that disabled lives have no worth. Assisted suicide receives a disproportionate amount of coverage and the effect is damaging to popular conceptions of physically disabled people.

My concern is that the attention given to individual high profile assisted suicide cases gives a biased viewpoint about disabled people and the worth of their lives. I have a productive life and I work hard to be considered equal to able-bodied people – I don’t want to be pitied or seen as courageous for living my life. If the only stories about disabled people in the media are ones of those seeking assisted suicide then this perpetuates the image of disabled people as leading intolerable lives that are better off terminated. It is that image which concerns me as it destabilises the existence of disabled people who do want to live. This slow drip effect feeds the public and reminds them of the fear that it could be them that ends up disabled for whatever reason. An able-bodied person who does not rely on others to live independently will not have a concept of how disabled people who are termed ‘severely disabled’ live and therefore when coverage of someone using a breathing mask or having to have their hair washed and their body washed by others this is deemed to be a horrific and humiliating situation for anyone to be in.

Of course it is not at all humiliating; it is just the reality for some people, including myself. I don’t think the fact that it takes at least 3 hours for me to be washed and dressed in the morning by someone else doing this for me is a good reason to end my life. And neither do I think twice about the fact that everything I do has to be done through the use of someone who is able-bodied because I physically have virtually no movement whatsoever. It is just part of life, it’s just the way it is. Just because you have to do something differently doesn’t mean that difference is necessarily bad. Imagine if humans could fly and we were born with different levels of ability in flying. Would the ones unable to fly be expected to want to kill themselves? Or would it just be understood that they have to walk or run and accept this?

I know that my personal perspective does not cause sensationalism and neither does it evoke pity.

What my story does is present an image of a strong independent woman who is disabled and doesn’t want to kill herself. It seems that disability cannot be accepted as positive by the mainstream, it’s just so much easier to portray ‘us’ as people whose quality of life must be despicable solely because of our impairments and the fact that we rely on others to exist.