A national disability rights group has launched a petition against Princeton University professor Peter Singer for his comments supporting killing disabled infants.
Not Dead Yet is a grassroots group opposing “the legalization of assisted suicide and euthanasia as deadly forms of discrimination” and is petitioning against Princeton University officials, New Jersey state legislators and the New Jersey governor.
The group is calling for Princeton to demand that Singer resigns and “publicly disavow” his statements against people with disabilities. It also wants the legislature and governor to “denounce the lethal and discriminatory public health care policy advocated by Princeton bioethicist Peter Singer,” Not Dead Yet’s petition read.
In 1980 Singer advocated for two policies that “would legalize the killing of disabled infants.” The first would redefine ‘personhood’ in a way that would make the lives of some animals more valuable than the lives of some people with disabilities, particularly infants with disabilities. The second would give parents the opportunity to have doctors kill their disabled newborns, according to the petition.
In 1999 Princeton hired Singer for a tenured position teaching bioethics. Disability activists protested his first day on campus by blocking the administrative building, among other things, according to the petition.
Ten years later the New York Times Magazine published Singer’s article, “Why We Must Ration Health Care,” in which Singer evaluated the cost of a human life in utilitarian terms. He used an example of a man who is told that he has an additional six months to live if he takes a costly medication. Singer then evaluates how that medication affects other people’s insurance premiums. He concludes that if anyone could put a ceiling price on the amount they would be willing to pay for an additional six months of life, they are in fact rationing health care.
Singer then argued that hospitals already provide better health care to insured people. He cited Joseph Doyle, an economics professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who estimated that those without health coverage received 20 percent less care and had a 37 percent higher death rate than those who had coverage. He argued that more money could go toward taking care of those who cannot afford coverage but have injuries that they could recover from, rather than those who are terminally ill and spend money to buy additional time, according to Singer in his article.
He also referred to a “hypothetical assumption” that one year as a quadriplegic is valued as half that as a healthy person. He then makes a case for denying people with severe disabilities health care on the premise that their lives are less valuable than those who are healthy, according to the petition.
In an interview on “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio,” Singer said to Klein, “I don’t want my health insurance premiums to be higher so that infants who can experience zero quality of life can have expensive treatments,” according to the petition.
Not Dead Yet slams Princeton University as having “provided Singer with a prominent platform and increased access to U.S. media and policymakers for 16 years, establishing itself as the home for the worst of overt — and deadly — bigotry against disabled people of all ages.”
“Enough is enough. It’s long past time for this outrage to end,” the petition concludes.
