We need better safeguards of what we already have - I had a family member this year who went into hospital with pneumonia and quickly was on the edge of death, but it turned out that someone had read cancer on his sheet and had been giving him unneeded morphine for weeks as well as called the family to say their goodbyes. Once corrected, he was able to heal and has since resumed cancer treatments and gotten married, but the person who did it almost killed him, almost cost them the benefits they need to survive (because he was in hospital so long), almost cost his partner her job, and brought great distress for him and the family all because they had written him off because of a different condition to what he went into hospital with. We need to discuss why society still writes people off without their input.
Personally, I'm finding how many able people are using disabled and chronically ill people as a reason why this is so needed really offensive and I don't think people realize that one of the most disempowering things is having other people tell me what my life is like. I am disabled and chronically ill. My partner is disabled as are most of my friends. Even as a disabled person myself, I wouldn't dare try to tell people how my partner or my friends views their chronic pain and he wouldn't try to tell people how I view the fact that my intermittent paralysis will become permanent. Telling me my life is pain, suffering, and disempowerment because their is no treatment shows how stuck some people are in the medical model and don't realize that many 'suffer' more because of other people and how society is maintained.
I have had people planning how I should die for as long as I can remember. I've had people telling me I should die for as long as I can remember. I will forever have to live with my family members, people meant to care for me, discussing and telling me that if I love them, if I reeeally loved them, I would kill myself. Having people discuss how they would be physically and mentally and financially better off if you'd just die really takes it's toll. And living in a society where this is not only acceptable but encouraged even more of one. I didn't think I would make it to adulthood because I honestly thought my parents would kill me, not my disabilities - my parents, and I thought that happened to most disabled people because of how few I was allowed to see. And it does happen to many young people with disabilities and their murderers more often than not are sympathized with rather than punished. We are a society that hides and despises the vulnerable and the weak and think that this has no effect on how we view ourselves or how others treat us.
I'm on the fence about assisted suicide, I don't think we as a society are in a place yet to use it properly or at least to use it without damaging other people who wish to live with dignity rather then die. I have body autonomy one hand and seeing how many disabled people are murdered without justice and commit suicide not from want of death but from fear of others and lack of resources to live on the other. I have self determination on one hand and a society that is determined to make us as isolated and guilty for living on the other. The yammer than this won't affect disabled people, that this won't have an impact on how chronically ill people are seen and treated shows that many people haven't the foggiest how much this rhetoric is already in our lives. We have people choosing these methods because of loneliness, many people say would use it before 'becoming a burden', and those are seen as normal and right rather than indication that our treatment and view of those in need. People should get a free choice, but in a society that tells those on the bottom that the world would be better without us constantly, that we would be better off not to become of them, is that a free choice or society's? It's difficult to see it clearly when I am a person and surrounded by people who are so often used as lives people would want to die to get away from.