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On disability, assisted dying and medicos

All too sadly society still hasn't learned how to deal with those suffering some form of disability.     Stella Young, personable, articulate, vocal and a person with disabilities, in a piece in The Guardian "Disability – a fate worse than death?" puts a compelling case against assisted dying and why people, especially medicos, are unsympathetic to those physically or mentally challenged.

"As a disabled person, I'm accustomed to conversations about quality of life and dignity. Specifically, I'm accustomed to assuring people that my life is worth living. I'm short statured, a wheelchair user, and I frequently have bone fractures. All the visual cues that make me "the other" are front and centre. People make all sorts of assumptions about the quality of my life and my levels of independence. They're almost always wrong.

I've lost count of the number of times I've been told, "I just don't think I could live like you," or "I wouldn't have the courage in your situation," or, my favourite one to overhear (and I've overheard it more than once), "You'd just bloody top yourself, wouldn't you?".

What we as a society think we know about what it means to live as a disabled person comes from cultural representations of disability seen through a non-disabled lens. And we, as people with disability, rarely get to tell our own stories.

Also, social attitudes towards disabled people come from a medical profession that takes a deficit view of disability. This is my major concern with legalising assisted death; that it will give doctors more control over our lives.

As a disabled person who has had a lot to do with the medical profession, I can tell you that this is the space in which I've experienced some of the very worst disability prejudice and discrimination. Doctors might know about our biology, but it doesn't mean they know about our lives."

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