The Disabled Are Fighting Back

A disability rights lawyer (disabled herself) fights for Terri with Aaron Brown:

BROWN: Let me try and ask the question a little bit differently. No state in the country allows a non-terminally ill person to commit suicide. Every state in the country would intervene in that matter. Ms. Schiavo clearly to me is not terminally ill in the way we think about terminal illness.

So, regardless of her wishes -- and let's just accept for this moment that those in fact are her wishes -- regardless of those wishes, should -- is it appropriate for a non- terminal person to end their life or to have assistance in ending their life?

JOHNSON: Well, I think the key distinction is that we have an incapacitated person and someone else making the decision. I would say that there are a few decisions that each of us can only make for ourselves. And one of those is to give up our lives. And here we have a substitute decision-maker claiming to have the right to end another person's life, again, based on disability, which is a stigmatized minority group.

But one person says, I can end my wife's life because of her disability. And I think, for that decision to be valid, there ought to be real solemn documents, like a properly executed health care proxy, that says, absolutely, after advice, this is what I want, because the truth is that many, many people say casually throughout their lives, I'd rather be dead than disabled.

I've had people come up to me and say, I would rather be dead if I had to live like you. But the reality is that most people adapt. Most people go on to lead good lives that they could never have imagined. And this case is a particularly tough one. But the law applies to all people. And I think it's just a dangerous idea to say that we're going to let a substitute decision-maker authorize the killing of another person based on fairly casual statements they made without any particular knowledge of what they were talking about.