The Wednesday Journal story about the Illinois medical aid in dying legislation, signed by Governor Pritzker, says the bill is highly controversial and mentions opposition from religious groups [As Pritzker signs aid in dying bill, Oak Parkers take some credit, News, Dec. 17]. There is no mention of disability.
The disability community did voice opposition to the legislation. Unlike the religious community, opposition from disability advocates is not grounded in faith. It is grounded in bias. Several years ago, the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine released a report based on surveys from physicians across the United States. The report found that “a substantial number of participants reported that they make strategic choices to deny care to people with disabilities.”
The disability bias was put into practice during the COVID-19 pandemic. According to a piece on the National Library of Medicine website, “There are some documented instances of disability discrimination in the provision of health care occurring during the pandemic.” In one case, a man with a spinal cord injury and a traumatic brain injury died of COVID-19 because doctors did not intervene with necessary treatment because doctors believed the man “didn’t have much of a quality of life” and “thus saving his life was not prioritized.”
Related to the legalization of assisted suicide, the concern is that people with disabilities will be pressured into taking their own life because of bias against disabilities and subjective ideas about quality of life. The legislation recently signed by Gov. Pritzker includes safeguards designed to protect against disability bias. One example is that individuals must have six months or less to live. This would preclude people with significant disabilities. That is a good thing. Nevertheless, the door is now open in Illinois. For some people, it’s not hard to imagine the hallway on the other side of that door leading to situations in which decisions to die are not about choice. They are about bias and the high cost of long-term care.
Link to Northwestern University Study: https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2022/10/health-care-discrimination-people-with-disabilities
Link to National Library of Medicine: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9436863
Gary Arnold
Oak Park
