In a previous post, I discussed the role that bioethicists in Canada, including feminist bioethicists, have played in the development in Canada of legislation and public policy designed to facilitate medically-assisted suicide and subsequent expansion of it. This set of events should be recognized as the incremental normalization of power relations that I discuss in chapter five of Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability with regard to medically-/physician-assisted suicide, prenatal testing, and stem cell research in particular.
The earlier post included a video of Professor Catherine Frazee, a former Chief Commissioner of the Ontario Human Rights Commission and Professor Emeritus in the School of Disability Studies at Ryerson University. In this post, I have included below another, more recent, video of Frazee in which they give expert testimony in opposition to the latest proposed expansion (Bill C-7) of the legislation. Another must-watch video with Frazee.
More and more disabled people have spoken out in the mainstream press, on social media, and in other venues against the legislation and expansion of it, especially with respect to the threats to their lives that it poses, the poverty and other social circumstances that MAID obscures, and the ableist exceptionism of the legislation itself. Many of these disabled authors and activists remain unconvinced by the arguments that feminist and other bioethicsts have advanced according to which the legislation incorporates safeguards ensuring that MAID won’t detrimentally affect disabled people and other vulnerabilized social groups. Links to a number of these articles are provided below this latest video of Catherine Frazee.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/opinion/opinion-medical-assistance-in-dying-maid-legislation-1.5790710
