New Film Spreads Message that Disabled Lives Are Not Worth Living: We Say They Are

May 31, 2016 by Jill

Petition from CitizenGo:

The film Me Before You is to be released in the UK on 3rd June. The film follows a romance between two of its characters one of whom eventually ends his life at a suicide clinic because he does not want to live life as a quadriplegic

The terrible message of this story, as Liz Carr, the disability rights activist of Not Dead Yet UK encapsulates it is: “if you’re a disabled person, you’re better off dead”.

Whether or not the filmmakers intended this message to come through, it is certainly there. This is where the ‘right to die’ (i.e. the right to be killed) leads.

Campaigners in favour of assisted suicide focus on choice, but this choice is not formed from nothing. Films like this which juxtapose the wonderful life the disabled person once lived – when he was not disabled – with the difficult life he now lives – since he became disabled – create a negative portrayal of disability and contribute to the view that life under conditions of severe disability is not worth living.

This prejudiced view of the lives of disabled people is the view of too many in society, and the soft bigotry of low expectations surely influences the ‘choice’ to commit suicide.

Read and sign Petition here