How they do it Stephen Drake, of NOT DEAD YET reported in an article in Ragged Edge, "Changing the Words, re-framing the issue: A brief history" that NDY and other groups had been expressing concern over some of the advocacy of the 'end of life' movement. "Specifically, we've charged that certain aspects of disability health care policy are being reframed as 'end of life care' policy. In doing so, groups such as Partnership for Caring and Last Acts have encroached on disability policy, but in re-naming it as something else have been able to bar our place at the policy discussion table....." "Partnership for Caring" was previously named "Choice in Dying" and before that "The Euthanasia Society of America." "Shortly after the Supreme Court in California rendered its decision in August 2001, saying that people with cognitive disabilities could not have life-sustaining treatment removed absent 'clear and convincing evidence of their own wishes' (the case of Robert Wendland), Last Acts decided to frame and define the Wendland case in its own way - for a much bigger audience than the one reading California Supreme Court decisions. ......In October 2001 the Last Acts Writers Project hosted a workshop for Hollywood writers. The workshop was meant to give writers story ideas and expert accounts of how 'end of life' stories should be framed..... Vicki Michel was Last Acts' Wendland 'expert' - she was the author of one of the many briefs arguing for Robert Wendland's death. As would be expected, her account of the case departed significantly from the facts marshalled by those of us fighting to save him and other people with cognitive disabilities. "Did the Last Acts workshop bear fruit? In the March 8 2002 episode of the television drama series 'First Monday', the justices grapple with a case eerily like that of Robert Wendland. James Garner plays one of the justices - a wheelchair user, who at first holds views about withholding food and water very similar to that of Not Dead Yet. But by the episode's end, he has a change of heart, and rules with the other justices to pull the plug" (The Ragged Edge magazine).
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