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COPYRIGHT 2005 Pro-Ed
In 1996 a multidisciplinary conference was held at Stanford University to develop consensus guidelines for physician-assisted suicide (PAS). I attended as a representative of the disability community and entered the conference a proponent of PAS but exited as a devout member of Not Dead Yet. This article outlines the key issues leading to that conversion. The conference attendees were unable to reach consensus.
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In September 1996, I attended an invitation-only conference on "Comprehensive Care of the Terminally Ill: A Northern California Consensus Development Conference for Guidelines in Aid-In-Dying," held at Stanford University. I was invited as a member of the disability community, and not in my role as a professor of psychology. This split in my identity, as either a person with a disability or a professional, was my first clue that disability issues might be marginalized. Nonetheless, I felt a fraud: I did not represent the opposition to PAS espoused by many disability-rights advocates and more than a dozen national disability organizations (e.g., National Council on Independent Living, National Council on Disability). I was neutral, leaning toward positive. Two days later I left the conference a rabid supporter of Not Dead Yet. This transformation was not a result of persuasion by people with disabilities but rather by being immersed in a group of educated people utterly ignorant of disability issues. As we parsed the issues involved in PAS, I found I held strong opposing views to those of most other attendees.
The purpose and structure of the conference are important to understand, because they are not incidental to my change in views. The multidisciplinary conference included about 100 professionals from the greater San Francisco Bay area. The conveners had clearly made efforts to be inclusive of different disciplines, and represented were religious leaders, philosophers, members of hospital ethics committees, physicians, psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, nurses, and pharmacists, as well as about five people with visible disabilities. Yet looking around the room I saw only three people of color. This was another clue that not only disability but other minority group issues were not an integral part of the planning.
The express purpose of the conference was to develop "consensus guidelines" (Young et al., 1997, p. 381). This purpose was not achieved, in part because people like me kept refusing to agree, and because some participants thought that jumping to the step of developing guidelines for PAS was presuming approval of PAS. Instead, the outcome was a paper documenting "important points of convergence, disagreement, and uncertainty ... and ... commentary on crucial issues" (p. 381).
Day 1 began with talks by persons with some expertise in PAS (e.g.,...
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