Medical model proponents contend that a disabled person's suffering arises from physical pain, and that death is the answer to pain, isolation, and oppression. Feminists have for decades been fighting for safe and affordable child care. Similarly, feminist activists should be joining disabled and senior activists in our political efforts. Every individual does have a right to control her own life. But in practice, the physician assisted suicide option has the potential of becoming a practice similar to the way sterilization has been performed on poor Black and Latina women after childbirth, who have been asked to sign a consent form for tubal ligation while they were in the throes of labor.
Death is an odd liberation from depression, isolation, powerlessness, violence, and sexism.
Feminist activists need to reject the eugenic thinking they've embraced. Barbara Waxman Fiduccia writes frequently about issues of reproductive rights. A longer version of this article appeared recently in a Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago newsletter. The law is truly unable to distinguish between a genuine assisted suicide and murder. The Manhattan district attorney's office said Delury could not now be charged again in his wife's death because it would constitute double jeopardy.