Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
I’ve always respected Steve Drake’s counterintuitive position on euthanasia—which is that “Let’s put this poor, suffering soul out of his/her misery” usually isn’t so much sensitive as selfish. Drake, who was born hydrocephalic, and whose parents were advised by the doctor who delivered him that they should keep him comfortable and let him die, is a research analyst for Not Dead Yet, a feisty disability rights group. When I wrote about him back in 2002 he told me he was bothered by growing support “for a new classification of murder called compassionate homicide.” Whether you qualified depended on whom you killed. “You can only go for compassionate homicide if the victim is old, ill, or disabled.”
Drake immediately jumped in. On the Not Dead Yet website he declared the familiar “we should treat people as well as we treat our animals” argument is a canard. We don’t treat animals well, he reasoned: we pen them, butcher them, and eat them, and when we put our beloved house pets out of their misery, it’s usually because they’ve become too much of a bother for us care for any longer.
