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.