Last week the Victorian Lower House passed an assisted suicide bill (euphemistically labelled a “voluntary assisted dying” bill) that has received significant opposition from disabled activists and palliative care bodies. The bill went to the Upper House, ironically, on Halloween and is currently being debated. A favourable Upper House vote seemed inevitable but some startling last-minute MP decisions have made the vote more precarious.
I am terminally ill and degeneratively disabled. Under the Victorian bill I would qualify for accessing assisted suicide as soon as it is available. And sorry, but that’s bullshit.
Disabled people are constantly taught that our lives are lesser because we are disabled, that disability is a tragedy, that disability is about suffering, that a disabled life is worse than death. Andrew Denton’s pro-assisted-suicide podcast is even titled Better Off Dead.
Disability is not a bad thing. We are disabled by our environments, by inaccessible infrastructure, by a world that values certain kinds of bodies and not others. Disabled suffering is not somehow more profound or unsalvageable than other kinds of suffering, like poverty, or domestic violence, or racism, or transmisogyny.