Hi, I’m Joni Eareckson Tada and sometimes I feel like a canary in a cage.
Remember in the olden days how coalminers would take canaries in cages down into the dark caverns of coalmines? Like when they cut a new shaft and didn’t know if there was poisonous gas, something they couldn’t smell. Well, the canaries were placed down there and if they died, the miners knew it meant death for them if they stayed there.
I thought about me and those canaries when I recently read of more efforts afoot to legalize assisted suicide for the terminally ill. A lot of proponents of assisted suicide feel that the views of people like me with disabilities aren’t relevant to this discussion. But I say, although people with disabilities aren’t usually terminally ill, the terminally ill are almost always disabled. And so, I believe that people who live with disabilities and chronic conditions serve as the proverbial “canaries in the coalmine,” alerting others to the dangers when we see assisted suicide on the rise. This is because disabled people, for the most part, live on the front lines of the health-care system that serves (and, sadly, often under serves) dying people.
Assisted suicide advocacy organizations paint themselves as “compassionate progressives”; you know, fighting for freedom against the “religious right.” Well, I have lots of friends in the disability advocacy community who aren’t religious and they aren’t on the right. Like my friend Diane Coleman who is a paraplegic. Diane has been studying assisted suicide and has made it a life career, and what she has found is stunning. First, it’s a fact that predictions that someone will die in six months are often wrong. It’s also true that people who want to die usually have treatable depression or they just need better pain management. Besides, the current pressures to cut health care costs in the current political climate make this the wrong time to add doctor-prescribed suicide to any “treatment” option. It’s a scary thing when a faulty diagnosis of a depressed person with a serious medical condition determines whether he gets suicide assistance or suicide prevention.
Take what is happening in Oregon where assisted suicide is legal. The most frequent request for assisted suicide is “I don’t want to be a burden on others”. Oh, my goodness, that’s a reason to ask someone to kill you? These people need to understand that there is respite. There is relief that can be provided to them. There are in-home support services.
In this country, our self-centered insistence on personal rights has created a culture of death. Because when the exercise of personal rights becomes the end-all, be-all, it takes God out of the picture and places man squarely at the center of life. A God-centered existence will reflect liberty … a man-centered: lack of liberty and a license to kill. This frightens me when I think of the elderly, people with Alzheimer’s, people who are medically fragile, and folks like me with significant disabilities, which is why I want you to go to my radio page today at joniandfriends.org to ask for your free copy of “Living by Vows.” It’s a booklet about hope and help, especially for someone in the end stages of life. Again, that’s joniandfriends.org. And my words today? Well, consider them your personal canary in the cage. Because it’s people like you and me by the power of the Spirit who can turn a culture of death into miraculously a culture of life. I invite you to visit joniandfriends.org.
© Joni and Friends, 2013
Compliments of Joni and Friends
PO Box 3333 Agoura Hills, CA 91376