'What lay ahead ...': a media portrayal of disability and assisted suicide

Our society treats people with disabilities in an inequitable manner when compared with non-disabled people. This marginalisation is especially telling in the area of end-of-life issues. The confounding of disability with terminal illness can support practices of encouraging death via assisted suicide and other means for people who, although vulnerable, are not at the end of their lives. The purpose of this paper is to examine a series of news articles covering a Canadian story of assisted suicide. From 2004-2006, newspapers followed the case of Marielle Houle, a mother accused of assisting her son in committing suicide. Although he had a disabling condition at the time of his death, Fariala was not at the end of his life. We use the analytical framework of critical discourse analysis to understand what role, if any, the press played in creating and reinforcing larger societal assumptions about living and dying with a disability.