"My Mum Didn't Die"

Good morning. I’m Anita Cameron, Director of Minority Outreach for Not Dead Yet, a national, grassroots disability organization opposed to medical discrimination, healthcare rationing, euthanasia and assisted suicide.

Assisted suicide laws are dangerous because though these laws are supposed to be for people with six months or less to live, doctors are often wrong about a terminal diagnosis. In 2009, while living in Washington state, my mother was determined to be at the end stage of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. I was told her death was imminent, that if I wanted to see her alive, I should get there in two days. She rallied, but was still quite ill, so she was placed in hospice. Her doctor said that her body had begun the process of dying.

Though she survived 6 months of hospice, her doctor convinced her that her body was still in the process of dying, and she moved home to Colorado to die.

My mum didn’t die. In fact, six weeks after returning to Colorado, she and I were arrested together in Washington, DC, fighting for disability justice. She became active in her community and lived almost 12 years!

The Final Countdown to Euthanasia?

By Lisa Blumberg

The usual line of the organizations promoting the legalization of assisted suicide (or medical aid in dying (MAID) as they like to call it) in New York and elsewhere is as follows: the sole reason for such laws is to prevent “end of life” suffering, that the laws only apply to people close to death and contain stringent guidelines. Moreover, they claim, in states which have such laws, there have never been abuses, meaning assisted suicide laws are safe.