Reply #6: Liquified cerebral cortex IS one kind of "severe handicap"...

[Banazir]

...similar to children with severe unshunted hydrocephalus.

Nobody can draw a line just because it'd be convenient to do so. And I won't draw a line because I don't believe it ethical to do so. I don't define personhood in the narrow, ableist terms that many non-disabled and some disabled people do. And I don't think someone's personhood is defined by whether they'll 'get better' or not. Someone might be a very different person than they were before, but they are still a person.

The Oregon law isn't just for "dire cases" and has already been abused and used in questionable ways including caregiver coercion and people running around to more and more doctors after the first doctor sees signs of foul play. Similar laws in the Netherlands are passing down the slippery slope into allowing infanticide, and disabled people there are often afraid for their lives should they get into an accident. That is not the direction of progress.

One of the most important parts of the article to my experience is the fear that other progressives will abandon disability rights -- including this facet of disability rights which may be among the most important -- in disgust because of what Bush and other Republicans are doing to it. We're already abandoned by the right, what Bush is doing is pure show. But we're in danger of being abandoned by the left, as is evident in the other thread where someone put out a bunch of disgusting quotes by left-wing people about Terri. People who think that the 'right to die' should be somehow high on a disability rights agenda (whether they're disabled or not)... really don't understand disability rights.