The University Illinois at Chicagos Lennard J. Davis takes just about everybody to task in his article “Life, Death, and Biocultural Literacy,” published Friday in the Chronicle of Higher Education. In this must-read piece, Davis argues the left, the right, bioethicists, philosophers, and disabilities studies folks are all short sighted and hypocritical in their positions on life, death, and abortion because of a lack of bioculture literacy (a deep understanding of “issues concerning the body, identity, history, and culture”).
Davis makes several valid points particularly in his critique of the disability movements position physician assisted suicide. He correctly points out that the movements sweeping arguments against choice in dying conflate dying with disability in a way that is both illogical and inconsistent with a movement dedicated to promoting independent living and free choice for its constituents. He writes:
Many disability advocates . . . claim that all people who are dying are, in fact, disabled, and that their identity as disabled individuals trumps their identity as autonomous beings. The faulty syllogism goes that dying people are disabled, and in an ableist society they naturally will be pressured to kill themselves; ergo disabled people are being put to death through physician-assisted suicide.
There are at least two flaws in that argument. First, it is hard to shoehorn someone dying of cancer, for example, into the category of chronic disability. The aim of making it possible for disabled people to live full lives with their impairments and of ensuring a free and accessible society has little to do with someone who will be dead in six months (the requirement for receiving physician-assisted suicide in Oregon). Why should people have to accept disability status when they will be dead within a few months? Second, according to statistics provided by Oregon, most people seeking physician-assisted suicide are end-stage cancer patients who, by and large, are educated, middle class, and informed. While it is true that many seek physician-assisted suicide because they fear losing their abilities and their autonomy, they no doubt have the independent judgment to make that decision.
It seems illogical for some disability advocates to try to prevent dying people from choosing a humane way of ending their lives (as opposed to shooting themselves or wrapping a plastic bag around their heads) because those advocates see suicide as a critique of the disability perspective.
Davis concludes that a more nuanced approach, a biocultural one, would make distinctions between physician assisted suicide, euthanasia, and abortion something the disabilities folks fail to do.
Yet some of Daviss assertions themselves lack nuance. For example, he claims that the “left’s” position (by left he seems to mean anyone who supported removal of Theresa Schiavos feeding tube) on Schiavo is “actually saying that we should assume that people who are disabled enough to be unconscious no longer have identities. According to that view, those people paradoxically no longer have the ability to have chosen to stay alive.” Daviss characterization of the position is simply wrong. The principal argument supporting removal a feeding tube in the Schiavo case was that Schiavos then-present identity (that of a person in a PVS) included and incorporated her identity as asserted before the onset of the PVS. That whole person, past and present, deserved respect. Had that person expressed a preference to stay alive, the so called left would have supported that preference.
– Alicia Ouellette