Phony Disability Rights Groups Set Up to Promote Doctor-Prescribed Suicide

Disability rights activists are among the most implacable and effective opponents of legalizing assisted suicide and euthanasia. In the USA, Not Dead Yet’s entry into the fray after the passage of Measure 16 in Oregon (1994) helped slow the advance of the killing agenda to a crawl.

Alarmed by the advocacy successes of these advocates, pro assisted suicide bankrollers funded Astroturf (as distinguished from “grass roots”) “disability rights” groups to support the killing agenda. Now the tactic is being tried in the UK as that country is dragged into yet another attempt to legalize physician-induced death.

Not Dead Yet UK is exposing the sham of an Astroturf group called Disability Activists for Dignity in Dying (DiD). From, “False Claims,” by Dr. Kevin Fitzpatrick:

“It is true they are all disabled people. However they are individuals with a point of view, not representatives of any Disabled People’s Organisation. For example, this new arm of the DiD campaign, is led by wheelchair user Greg Judge. He is listed as a member of staff and is therefore paid by DiD to represent the organisation’s core mission and values. Hardly representative!

“NDY [Not Dead Yet] UK, on the other hand, is a network of disabled people working largely pro bono and who have been mandated to represent the views of many disabled people. There is a real difference.”

He’s right. For nearly 20 years, I have seen people with disabilities sacrifice their own money and suffer serious discomfort to protest and lobby against assisted suicide! They did so because they know disabled people are in the cross hairs-not because they were paid lobbyists who happen to be disabled. Huge difference.

Fitzpatrick highlights the danger to people with disabilities:

“DiD know what the evidence shows – from Holland, where children over the age of 12 are entitled, and disabled babies are euthanized because of their disability, or because of their parents’ suffering, when the law was first introduced for exactly the kind of ‘desperate, hard case’ DiD keep promoting to gain public sympathy – from Belgium where people who are in need of support and care are euthanized – and where the current discussion to extend euthanasia to children is proceeding but where ‘We all know that euthanasia is already practiced on children. Yes, active euthanasia’ according to the head of the intensive care unit of Fabiola Hospital in Brussels. He made his comments to the Senate’s Judicial and Social Affairs Committee at a February 21 hearing 2013. Belgium, where if you are becoming blind you can opt for euthanasia, or if the healthcare system botches your sex-change operations your care options can include death by lethal injection, and where ‘studies…demonstrate that 32% of people killed under the Belgian law were killed without consent and without their own request, in breach of a fundamental condition of that law’ (as pointed out by Alex Schadenberg of EPC).”

These statements are not “slippery slope” alarmist projections. They are facts on the ground!

He concludes:

“DiD are promoting themselves as a caring organisation who offer the ‘voice of reason’. They are using a handful of non-representative disabled people to promote the idea that disabled people agree with them. The facts do not support this assertion, real disabled activists are opposed to the law being changed and nothing I have read, seen or heard makes me think otherwise.”

So again, I find myself asking: what is their real purpose?

Answer: To sow confusion among disability-friendly people toward the end that a law be passed that will result in the euthanasia/assisted suicide abandonment deaths of people with disabilities.

Wesley J. Smith