In recent months the movement to legalize physician-aided suicide has scored impressive wins in Oregon and Washington state. That's a bone-chilling message for some severely disabled people who may now find themselves defined as "terminally ill." PNS contributing editor Mark O'Brien is a Berkeley-based writer and poet who lives in an iron lung.

BERKELEY -- Advocates of the movement to legalize physician aided suicide argue that it's only fair to give terminally ill people the same assistance we give terminally ill animals. I see flaws in such arguments, perhaps because I live in an iron lung.

Under a new Oregon law, "terminally ill" is defined as anyone a physician expects to die within six months. Sounds reasonable, until you notice the absence of the phrase "without medical intervention." Without medical intervention in the form of my iron lung, I would die within six hours. Without medical intervention in the form of insulin, my sister, a diabetic, would die within six days. Disabled people who need to be fed are defined under this law as "terminally ill."

Another problem with such legislation is the assumption that disabled people cannot end our lives without help. The suicide rate among disabled people exceeds that of the general population, so we must be doing something right. It is condescending to think we lack the imagination to kill ourselves. I knew a quadriplegic who succeeded in starving himself while in a hospital.

What the movement for physician-aided suicide really wants is social approval of suicide as honorable. Whether or not suicide IS honorable is up to each of us to decide, but the movement wants a general, political endorsement of suicide.

A final assumption of this movement is that physicians would be the best qualified people to assist in suicide. But there are numerous examples of how physicians have betrayed such trust.

Consider the recent case of Ronald Comeau, reported by Wesley Smith in National Review. A drifter who was arrested by Vermont police, Comeau hung himself in jail but was cut loose before he could suffocate. Comatose, he was taken to a hospital where a court appointed guardian ordered his feeding tube removed, apparently on the grounds that were he in Comeau's condition, he would not want to live. The decision was endorsed by the hospital's doctors and would have ended his life had it not been for the intervention of Operation Rescue.

That medical authorities would have reacted that way doesn't surprise me. Dependent on an iron lung for over 35 years, I have long sensed the discomfort people -- including those in the medical profession -- feel at seeing me. Sometimes I can almost hear them thinking, "Get rid of these people, I don't care how, just get them out of my sight."

I also know how concern for the emotional needs of able-bodied people has often guided policy decisions about disabled people. Plato urged the murder of disabled infants. Many societies have murdered us as a matter of routine. Hitler's programs of extermination began as a program to eliminate "life unworthy of life," that is, the disabled.

America has led the world in creating policies that respect the dignity of disabled people. It may be that our increasing visibility may now be causing a backlash, if not among average Americans who continue to wish us well, then among physicians, insurance companies, and the bio-ethicists they pay to develop moral reasons to withhold food, water and medical care from the "terminally ill."

In principle, people diagnosed with fatal diseases should be given the choice of hospice care where they can receive pain medication and the psychological and spiritual counseling they need for this final crisis. But such care is expensive, the population is aging and insurance companies need to maintain their profits.

Instead of investing in respectful care of the dying and independent living for the disabled, society is now being encouraged to consider the quack remedy of Death With Dignity.

In response, I quote disabled writer Cheryl Marie Wade: "I don't want to hear about death with dignity until we are all allowed life with dignity."