Since I seem to be posting a lot about movies I haven't yet seen:
I remember the first time I saw an ad for Million Dollar Baby. I had no idea how it ends. All I saw was a movie about a woman boxer -- a female fighter. I'm a sucker for that sort of thing. I enjoy being an athletic person with a disability. I take great pride in using my body to the fullest.
I'm also always eager to see uncompromisingly athletic women. Women who do not limit what they do or how they compete based on femininity. I've always liked that. I don't know whether this is why or not, but I've always suspected it had something to do with my disability. I always loved and wanted fitness and strength, and going from a childhood where I was constantly told what I can't do or would never do to an adulthood full of athletics, from the tae kwon do I did for many years to the dumbbell routines I do now every day has been exhilarating.
So when I saw what I thought was a movie about a woman learning to compete in an aggressive sport generally considered reserved for men, I really wanted to see it. I still remember the haunted look of my family as I told them, excitedly, that it looked like there was going to be a really good "woman fighter" movie. "Don't see that," they said. "It's very sad."
I asked them why, and they told me. "Ouch" is all I can say to describe how I felt hearing that the real story, apparently, was how sad and awful it is to be a quadroplegic and how being one makes you want to die.
Why do able-bodied directors make things like that? When I recovered from major surgery, I met a man during my pool exercises who had become a quad in a motorcycle accident. He was of course upset at what he'd lost, but the thing I most remember was what an upbeat fellow he was. He loved life. That enthusiasm led him to risky fun that had unfortunately cost him... but his love of life and experiences didn't end. He liked that pool. He liked what he could do. He liked telling me the stories of his life, his fun on bikes.
I don't say this to suggest he was never depressed. For all I know he could have cycled between ups and downs, easily. But what I saw was someone friendly, kind, and happy. I don't have any doubt he easily learned to like his life, whatever he might have missed. So the whole picture of us as mopey sad sacks desperate for death strikes me as wildly off-base.
On the actual topic of assisted suicide, I don't know what I think. I tend to feel that absolute autonomy means having a right to end one's life. But on the other hand, I feel that there's a strange disparity. When we people with disabilities want to end our lives, and appeal to the suffering we experience, that's taken to be rational, even brave. When an able-bodied person feels like dying, that's taken to be a sign of acute mental ill-health, a kind of mind-sickness, something we have to at all costs fix. So it worries me that some people put such emphasis on the right of PWDs to die, when a depressed teenager with no wheelchair or chronic ailment is whisked off nonconsenting to a mental hospital on the theory her mind is experiencing grave, acute illness.
I don't know the solution. I don't know how exactly I feel about right to die. I just know how I feel about that disparity. That it suggests to me that people with disabilities are looked at as if our lives are less worth saving, or at the very least, less good.
And the idea that Million Dollar Baby is somehow brave or inspiring or cool because a character hated life so much she bit her tongue repeatedly in a desperate effort to tell those around her she needed to die, because she was quadroplegic -- well.
Again, I've not seen it, so I don't know how good it was or wasn't. But all I can offer is my reaction from then: Ouch.
The reaction of a person who wanted to see something awesome about a woman's bravery, her resolve to live as she willed, and heard, instead, about how brave it is for people like me to... die.
