Right to survive

 Beginning disclaimer: I'm going to talk a lot about death and suicide in this post.

Let's talk about the "right to die."

I am an advocate of bodily autonomy. If an informed, uncoerced, freely consenting adult is truly certain about choosing to end their life, I don't want to stand in their way.

That said.

Here's the thing.

If you're an adult who is not under guardianship and is not being involuntarily hospitalized or institutionalized, you already, in practice, have the right to end your own life. It's fairly easy to do. Poisons and weapons are fairly attainable. I don't need to go into detail here; adults know how death works ("Unsuccessful" suicide attempts are often deliberately "unsuccessful," because many people are driven to suicide attempts by involuntary intrusive thoughts rather than intentional choice).

The only people who do not have access to the right to die are people having this choice actively constrained -- people who are institutionalized, involuntarily hospitalized, or under guardianship. If the "right to die" movement were centered on abolishing adult guardianship, institutionalization, and involuntary hospitalization, I would be its loudest proponent.

Yet, most "right to die" advocates have little or no objection to these things, which should be our first clue that this movement's goals aren't quite what they seem.

So free adults who want to end their own lives can generally already do so without too much difficulty.

This is why "right to die" advocacy is mostly about the right to choose to consent to someone else (a doctor or family member, usually) killing you.

Now, accepting -- as I do -- the philosophical premise that individuals own their own bodies, and therefore, if they freely choose to, can consent to allow someone else to take their lives, it is nonetheless extremely difficult to prove, in any given case in which this has happened, that the dead person (being dead, and unable to testify) did in fact give free, uncoerced consent prior to their death.

So it's relatively easy for free adults who truly want to end their lives to do so, and it's relatively difficult to truly be certain that someone who consented to be killed by someone else was giving fully uncoerced consent.

In light of this, what's the actual effect of pushing for the "right to die" (or, more accurately, "right to be killed with prior consent")?

Well, whether or not it's the intent of the people promoting it (and I reserve the right to be cynical on that question), the effect is to normalize and naturalize the idea of death as a reasonable, desirable, and morally good solution to disability (especially the intersection of disability and poverty).

This makes the "consent" and "choice" part of the equation less necessary.

Someone murders their disabled family member? Well, we can't prove they DIDN'T consent to be killed, so, hey, reasonable doubt.

Parents murder their disabled child? Well, they consented on her behalf, so it's fine.

Need medical treatment? It's awfully expensive, have you considered death instead?

Recently, I argued with someone defending the murder of a disabled person (using the "you don't know that they DIDN'T consent" reasoning), and, when I argued that if someone really, truly wanted to end their own life, they could do it themself, the person retorted that some people choose to stay alive for religious reasons, and that's why it's okay for someone else to kill them.

Now, my first instinct was to argue that religious reasons are perfectly valid reasons for wanting to stay alive -- but note the shift in discourse that would accept. Why do people need to justify their reasons for wanting to stay alive? Why is anyone entertaining the idea of valid or invalid reasons for staying alive? Why isn't NOT killing people the baseline default that needs no reason or justification?

What kind of dystopian hellscape forces people to provide a "good enough reason" for not wanting to die any sooner than they have to?

I've noticed that many people who are generally disability allies, some of whom are disabled themselves, seem quite stuck on understanding why organized disability advocates are generally skeptical of the "right do die" movement. After all, aren't we in favor of bodily autonomy, and freedom of choice, for all disabled people?

And yes, we are!

I, for one, fully support the right of any adult to choose to end xyr life so long as xe is making an informed, uncoerced choice.

But that's not what we're talking about here.

You cannot make a truly free, uncoerced choice to die unless you also have the freedom to choose to live.

And too many people, including other disabled people, cannot conceptualize WANTING to live with whatever they think of as "severe" disability. They simply take for granted that no one could really want to live "like that," whatever "like that" means, in their minds. "No quality of life" is a term that comes up a lot, even though there's no such thing -- everyone has SOME quality of life. No form of disability, impairment, or adaptive equipment is synonymous with a quality of life of ZERO.

If society can't fathom a "severely" disabled person with (allegedly) "no quality of life" actually WANTING to live, there is no impetus to ensure that such "severely" disabled people actually have the resources and conditions they need to live well, or even to ensure that their right to life is legally protected (which it is not, if anyone who kills them is presumed to be doing them a favor).

In fact, many "severely" disabled people DO want to continue living as long as possible -- even those who, prior to becoming disabled, said that they would not want to live under those conditions (https://www.kevinmd.com/.../patients-deviate-advance...)

If you, as a consenting adult, want to make the informed and uncoerced choice to end your life, you should be free to do so. And for the most part, you are free to do so. You can have the right to make that choice about your own body without having it reified, on a societal, legal, cultural, medical, political, philosophical level, that death is the "correct" or "obvious" response to some forms of disability. You can exercise that choice without disparaging forms of assistive and medical equipment, or making generalizations about how "no one would want" to live "like that," or assuming, without evidence, that the killing of someone "like that" must have been asked-for or well-intentioned.

Because if you truly believe in choice, you must ensure that every disabled person has free access to the choice to live.

Debt does not excuse murder

Imagine this scenario:

A man, who is married, finds himself in financial crisis. He has fallen deeper and deeper into debt, and bills are accumulating. He becomes desperate. Then, he murders his wife. Shortly thereafter, he kills himself.

What are your feelings about this scenario? The husband/killer, the wife/victim, and his motivations?

If you're like most people with a strong conscience, you're repulsed by the murder. Any inkling of sympathy you have for the suicidal desperation of this man is powerfully diminished by the abhorrence of taking the life of another person.

If you've read or heard much about domestic violence and spousal murder, you might contextualize this instance as part of a pattern in which men, desperate enough to take their own lives, will sometimes murder their wives (and sometimes children) before they kill themselves. You might interpret this as a symptom of a culture in which men see wives and children as extensions of themselves, such that their right to end their own lives extends to the right to end the lives of the people who belong to them.

Would your first assumption, when you heard about this scenario of spousal murder-suicide, be that the wife must have consented to it?

Would you assume by default that a wife murdered by her husband must have been a willing participant?

I'm guessing not.

Now add the detail:

The couple were both elderly, with health issues, and the financial crisis was due to medical bills.

Does that change your response?

Are you now assuming that yes, actually, the wife must have consented to be murdered?

Are you now full of compassion for the poor, beleaguered husband, unable to afford to maintain his expensive, burdensome wife?

That's ableism.

Assuming that murdered disabled people must have wanted to be dead, or be better off dead, is ableism.

Giving the benefit of the doubt to disabled people's killers is ableism.

Conceptualizing murder of disabled people as an "understandable" response to circumstances is ableism.

Framing murders of disabled people as arguments for "better services" is ableism.

"But medical debt is a real problem..." No. Stop.

Of course medical debt is a real problem. Of course lack of services for disabled people is a real problem. SO IS MURDER. Healthcare is a human right, but so is NOT BEING MURDERED.

Enabling people to exist

 It's a sunny Saturday afternoon, so it's a good time to remind everyone that the concept of "enabling" is ableist, capitalist propaganda.

The "enabling" concept originated in the context of addiction -- the premise being that friends and family of addicted people should not help the addicted person continue to use drugs or alcohol. Even in this original context, it's rather heartless -- addicted people can literally die from drug withdrawal; they can't always just choose to stop taking drugs.

But it's been taken much further in a capitalist society where being poor and being disabled are considered "bad choices." Even the most rudimentary aid to the poor is classified as "enabling." Privileged people are allowed to frame themselves as rationally displaying "tough love" by allowing people to starve and die in the streets.

Recently, a free public toilet for homeless people was criticized as "enabling." Because if people with no home, no money, few possessions, and minimal access to hygiene are allowed to use the toilet, this may "enable" their "choice" to be poor. Somehow if they have no toilet, the desperation might somehow "motivate" poor people to... generate money and a home, somehow. This is the depth of the capitalist belief that making poor people suffer is good, actually, because poverty is their own fault.

This, of course, also applies to disability. Equal access "enables" disabled people to choose to be disabled. With enough barriers in place, we will become motivated to simply choose to be abled.

In particular, this capitalist-classist-ableist-neurobigoted trope applies at the intersection of psychiatrically disabled people who choose not to use medication, and also are poor, unemployed, or homeless. Material assistance is denounced as "enabling" psychiatrically disabled poor people's "bad choice" to opt out of psychiatric medication, as it is presumed that, if they were pressured or forced to accept medication (or were desperate enough to acquiesce to it), they would become neurotypical-passing, and be hired for some well-paying job that would lift them out of poverty. Of course, this isn't how psychiatric medication nor capitalism actually work.

All people deserve a basic standard of living. Food. Shelter. Bodily autonomy. Healthcare with consent. Bathrooms. No one "chooses" to be poor and desperate. Reject the narrative of "enabling."

Racism is normal, "healthy," and evil

 I was going to write another long, articulate post about how blaming violence on "mental health issues" is inaccurate and oppressive, and why involuntary commitment is a human rights violation.

But I have a headache. And I'm tired of writing the same thing over and over, using different wording, hoping that this one will make people acknowledge my humanity.

A racist president has emboldened racist murderers, just like we knew he would. That same racist president is using racist murderers as a pretext to strip rights from disabled people, just as we knew he would. Every liberal and progressive who bought into the "mental health" narrative is complicit. We told you. We knew. It's depressing to be right.

If you are a white American, you have had ample opportunity to notice the warning signs of violent racism reaching at a crisis point. If you are not white, you haven't had the luxury of waiting for warning signs. We have open Nazis in public office. We have the New York Times asking "moderate" Nazis to report violent Nazis to the police. American Muslims can't exercise their constitutionally guaranteed right to freedom of religion without being spied on, entrapped, and framed for alleged terrorist conspiracies, but Nazis can self-police.

Look around. Racism isn't neurodivergent. Racism is the most socially normal, neurotypical human activity of all.

Do you think only neurodivergent people believe that other ethnic groups are inferior? Read a history book. Read a newspaper. Read a blog post by an Indigenous person. Read something other than the softpedaled white nationalist propaganda that says that racism is the fault of Those Weirdos and Unintelligent people, and if everyone went to college and read the New York Times and learned to frame their racism intellectually, it wouldn't be a problem anymore. Well, colleges and the New York Times are caping for Nazis now. It looks like that approach has failed.

Neurotypical white Americans, take the plank out of your own eye. Violent racism and white nationalist terrorism are products of your social and cultural norms. They are not weird brain variants, defective mutations of normal humanity. They are normal humanity.

Neurodivergent white Americans also need to do our part in addressing and confronting the white nationalist movement. Neurodivergent people of color are the primary victims of police violence, roundups, institutionalization, forced drugging, incarceration, poverty, and homelessness. And neurodivergent people of color are exponentially more tired of writing the same things over and over again.

Nobody needs an assault rifle. Nobody needs an ethnostate. Racism is deadly. Neurobigotry is deadly. We're all tired. We're all scared. That's not an excuse. All brains are good brains. All human ethnicities are good human ethnicities. All ideologies are not good ideologies. Racism is a bad ideology. It has nothing to do with brains, and everything to do with society. Dismantling it is complex. Acknowledging it as wrong is simple.