Choices & rights

I came within a whisker of being aborted on the grounds of disability. My mum already had one blind child when she became pregnant with me. I was saved by the state of medical ignorance. Doctors reassured her that the chances of her having another blind child were a million to one. Whoops! I turned out to be
a long-odds baby.

When my mum fell pregnant again only a year or so later, she was not so trusting of medical opinion. She got reluctant agreement to a termination – a rare achievement in the 1940s. I’ve never blamed her. Looking after three blind pre-school children in a post-war prefab, with no guarantees of support or about the kind of future we faced, was no joke for a working-class couple. But what it has left me with, now living a very good life, is a healthy respect for the right to life (mine in particular). What it’s also left me with is an even greater respect for my right to choice, unrestricted by other people’s view of my disability.

Surely at the heart of everything disabled people have been fighting for for over 40 years is choice: the right to choose where we live, where we work, and our right to join in with all aspects of society. In which case, isn’t the ultimate control over your life the right to choose when, and how, to end it?
Which is why I‘m concerned about opposition to assisted dying legislation being based on the vulnerability of disabled people. Should we not make a clear distinction between the right to choose what to do with our own lives, and the right to be protected from undue pressure, whether we’re disabled or not, from doctors and relatives, etc?

Whether you oppose this right on religious grounds, or on the grounds that you belong to a particularly vulnerable group, surely what you’re doing is stopping everyone else from exercising a right that you don’t want.

I absolutely understand why someone with what the world regards as a severe disability could fear the decision about when they die being taken out of their hands. It should be made virtually impossible for anyone, especially doctors,  to be able to do this. But is that a reason for disabled people, who of all people have championed the issue of choice, to use their political muscle to prevent other people from
exercising theirs?

We should fight tooth and nail to stop people making life-and-death decisions about us, based on their wholly inadequate understanding of our quality of life, but not at the expense of everyone else’s freedom of choice.