An open letter to my MP Cat Smith over the Assisted Dying Bill

The following is an open letter to Labour Party MP Cat Smith, over the Assisted Dying Bill. 

Dear Cat Smith,

I am writing to express my concern about the Assisted Dying Bill and ask you to vote against it.

I have thought about this letter so much, rewrote it, and rewrote it so much; the grooves of my mind ache. I have tried to put in order what I have seen, heard, what I know and knew before. I wanted to place my knowledge and experience in straightforward paragraphs. “What’s a good opening paragraph?” “A line that’ll snag on something within her?”

I have worn myself out and worn myself down in the process of trying. The problem is that I have too much skin in the game. I come from a line of disabled women in history who lost something of themselves because of the choices of others. I see and feel the past, present, and future here.

There is a quote from a film that has rather accidentally got into my bones as I move through life; it’s from You’ve Got Mail: “Whatever else anything is, it ought to begin by being personal.”

I cannot imagine anything more personal than this bill, and I wonder what words on a page will convince a stranger, though we have met briefly, to vote against it.

Should the words be plain and clean, stark but unimpassioned?

Here’s the simple truth: I have a constant, sickening ache in my gut, bile rising in my throat. But, I have always been taught to bite reaction and emotion down as I experience ableism – abuse.

I used to be pro-assisted dying. I used to believe it should be everyone’s right to choose. It’s such a superficial, shallow little sentiment that I barely want to own it. I didn’t think about how it would impact disabled people, and I have been disabled since the day I was born, nor how it would be controlled. I didn’t stop to think it through. What choice are disabled people going to have in a decade or more – or less? I’m a little older and wiser now, and the world is a little uglier.

So, here’s the staring-you-right-in-the-face experience.

I am a disabled woman now, and that comes with hard truths and responsibilities. It comes with an instinctive need to put everything into this fight because I have occupied the real world and social media in a disabled body and know what could happen. I have come to accept one simple truth: some non-disabled people think we’d be better off dead.

I have been told in the supermarket and on the street by strangers that if it happened to them: “They would off themselves.”

They would want to die.

People like me? We’re the scroungers, the scum – yet the sometimes Superhumans. Sometimes, I must move through the world with my head down, eyes forward, rigid. Sometimes, a non-disabled person will stop me as I go about my ordinary life, and I will silently, wordlessly, beg them not to say anything that will pummel me down further, not to touch me or move my body without permission as I plead “No”.

There’s a pulsating fear that comes with living in a disabled body now. I used to think that my startle reflex was solely the result of my disability. Now, I believe that the feral thing that sits in muscle also comes from experience.

Could you rely on the judgement of non-disabled strangers having gone through such events? It’s a dangerous time to change the law; it is too much to ask disabled people to trust in a system, in a set of safeguards, when we have seen, felt, and tasted the fear of such things and witnessed the Covid-19 response.

The Assisted Dying Bill states that only adults with a terminal illness who are expected to die within six months will be suitable for assisted death. The person must have the mental capacity to choose the end of their life and must have a “clear, settled, and informed” wish free from coercion and pressure.

But how can anyone believe that a system already under such strain could listen intimately and re-listen and re-listen, searching carefully for a fracture, for fear, in another’s voice, eyes, or posture?

I know this is a fight for disabled lives.

So, here are some stinging realities about these ugly things that are staring us right in the face.

We’ve already seen the widening of categories that are open to people wanting to have an “assisted” death. In Oregon, this includes ‘loneliness’ as a category. In the Netherlands, bases for seeking an assisted death include anxiety, depression, and alcoholism.

People who support assisted dying often assert that this broadening won’t happen here. But how can they be sure any safeguards will be hardy enough; that these are? How do they know? Non-disabled people too often make pinky promises with little care if they crack our fingers.

I feel for anyone who is suffering and in pain, and we need more support and understanding for those who work in end-of-life care, the dying, and their families. But we can’t trade one person’s pain for another’s, and we can’t promise the noose won’t ever tighten as we place it lightly around disabled people’s necks.

I am not opposed to assisted dying if safeguards are properly put in place thoughtfully. But while I still feel this pulsating ache, and bile still rises in my throat, while it all still feels so personal and impersonal – I hope you vote against it.

Yours sincerely,

Melissa Parker.

Featured image via the Canary