I've never had in myself a capacity to truly hate another person. I've never wished that I could harder than today, because I collected enough spoons to read the Charlotte Fitzmaurice interview.
“My daughter is no longer my daughter, she is now merely just a shell" NO SHE IS A PERSON. HER BRAIN IS WORKING SHE IS A PERSON.
“Watching my daughter suffer for days while they cut off her fluids was unbearable. She went in pain. It will stay with me forever.” THEN WHY DID YOU DECIDE TO KILL HER THAT WAY
“Simple things like birds singing and hearing children play would put the most beautiful smile on her face. She loved Michael Buble and when I slurped my tea she would give out a hearty chuckle." SO WHY DID YOU DECIDE TO TAKE AWAY ALL HER FUTURE MOMENTS OF HAPPINESS, ALL HER SMILES AND LAUGHTER
“We were constantly in and out of hospital. She never developed more than a six-month-old child." FUCK. OFF.
"She wasn’t my angelic child any more, she was a shell. I wanted beautiful memories of Nancy, not soul-crushing ones." WHAT MORE EVIDENCE DO YOU NEED THAT THIS WAS ALL ABOUT HER AND HER NEEDS "she was a shell" WHY CAN'T I HATE YOU FOREVER. WHY CAN'T I FEEL SOMETHING OTHER THAN SADNESS.
"It shouldn’t have to be a mother’s decision to end a child’s life, I believe hospitals and parents should be able to decide without mothers or fathers going to court." this is the most terrifying sentence I've ever read.
"The light from her eyes is now gone and is replaced with fear and a longing to be at peace."
you killed your daughter. you killed your daughter. you can never take that back.
If you identify with or feel sorry for Nancy Fitzmaurice's parents you are not a good person. You are not a good parent, a good ally, or a good anything, and you promote the idea that disabled lives matter less than abled lives. If you are disabled and you feel badly for her parents, love yourself and deal with your internalized ableism. Nancy Fitzmaurice was murdered. The fact that she was disabled being an excuse shows how fucking ableist society is.
They talk about low quality of life. And when they talk about quality of life, they're talking about value of life. As if you could measure the value of a life. You can't.
They talk about quality of life. As if death was somehow better. As if you have to earn being alive by being happy enough. Maybe that's why they train us to smile and smile and smile until we don't know how not to.
As if there were only so many spaces on earth and we were using up one that could be filled by a real person.
They lock us up and they say we are grateful and they strip us of everything and they say we are grateful and then they kill us, and they say we are grateful.
And it's terrifying, how many people think it's okay. You're telling me not to judge this killing; do you want me not to judge you when you kill? Are you not judging because you are doing as you hope you will be done by?
They're killing us. The doctors. The ones that are supposed to be keeping us alive, are killing us.
They kill us by pinning us to the floor and calling it help, and locking us in places where we don't have our basic needs met and calling it help, and shooting us and calling it help, and taking away our food and water and starving us to death and calling it help. Because the value of our life is negative and we are not allowed to exist.
"Two points of human rights violations in the ghastly euthanasia issue are the questions around consent without outside pressure when the patient is disabled or cannot indicate consent, and the idea that most of what is labeled mercy killing of late is killing, with pain and horribly, then the perpetrator using the victim's disability as an excuse to say "it was an act of mercy" afterwards.
[...]
...When we are all arguing about these topics, I hope we remember that the person whose life was decided without her say was Nancy Fitzmaurice. She was 12 years old..."
Kerima Çevik at Autism Wars
[TW at link: ableism, murder, euthanasia, child murder, medical malpractice]
Two points of human rights violations in the ghastly euthanasia issue are the questions around consent without outside pressure when the patient is disabled or cannot indicate consent, and the idea that most of what is labeled mercy killing of late is killing, with pain and horribly, then the perpetrator using the victim's disability as an excuse to say "it was an act of mercy" afterwards.
[...]
....When we are all arguing about these topics, I hope we remember that the person whose life was decided without her say was Nancy Fitzmaurice. She was 12 years old.
Kerima Çevik, "Disparity in Health Care: Malpractice, Euthanasia, and 60 Minutes' "Breeding Out Disease" Episode" at Autism Wars
[TW at link: ableism, murder, euthanasia, child murder, medical malpractice]
The Autistic Self Advocacy Network issued the following statement on Tuesday, October 28th, regarding the killing of Nancy Fitzmaurice.
The Autistic Self Advocacy Network is profoundly concerned by the recent decision from the United Kingdom allowing Great Ormond Street Hospital in London to kill Nancy Fitzmaurice, a disabled 12-year old, through the withholding of fluids at the request of her mother. The decision constitutes an extremely troubling legal precedent, representing the first time the British legal system has allowed a child breathing on her own, not on life support and not diagnosed with any terminal illness, to be killed by the medical system.
Euthanasia of people with disabilities is an extremely dangerous and wholly inappropriate solution to inadequate pain management. In cases where painkillers are insufficient, a number of alternatives for pain management exist. A policy of euthanasia targets vulnerable people, particularly when it is applied to children. People with disabilities who experience chronic pain should have same access as others to life-sustaining medical treatment.
When parents and physicians have the ability to authorize the killing of disabled children, we see serious abuses. Recently, ASAN and twelve other disability rights groups filed an amicus brief in a case challenging the University of Wisconsin Hospital’s practice of counseling parents to withhold care from children with disabilities for treatable but life-threatening medical conditions. In one such instance, a child with developmental disabilities died after a hospital doctor advised his parents that they could withdraw his feeding tube – which provided fluids and nutrition – based on his supposedly low “quality of life.” The medical condition supposedly justifying this measure was treatable pneumonia. The child died the next day, after administration of morphine. Such actions demonstrate the results of a policy that allows families and clinicians to discriminate on the basis of disability in the application of life-sustaining treatment.
The media coverage surrounding this case has been extraordinarily irresponsible, implying that the child’s disability should justify a decision that her life was unworthy of living. ASAN is concerned that the voices of people with disabilities with similar support needs were not heard in this discussion. Many people with disabilities who utilize feeding tubes or experience other conditions similar to those Nancy Fitzmaurice face live in the community and do not feel that their lives are not worth living. The absence of the voices of people with disabilities who could shed light on the lived experiences of children like Nancy is troubling in the extreme.
We urge advocates and policymakers to stand against legal and legislative decisions enabling the killing or withholding of life-sustaining care from disabled children and adults. As ASAN’s previous work has indicated, people with disabilities continue to face systemic and ongoing discrimination in accessing the medical system. Inaccurate and dangerous assumptions that our lives are not worth living have claimed too many lives. People with disabilities deserve better.
