Shameful State Care of Developmentally Disabled

Shameful State Care of Developmentally Disabled » Secondhand Smoke | A First Things Blog: In New York, it is unusually common for developmentally disabled people in state care to die for reasons other than natural causes. One in six of all deaths in state and privately run homes, or more than 1,200 in the past decade, have been attributed to either unnatural or unknown causes, according to data obtained by The New York Times that has never been released. The figure is more like one in 25 in Connecticut and Massachusetts, which are among the few states that release such data. What’s more, New York has made little effort to track or thoroughly investigate the deaths to look for troubling trends, resulting in the same kinds of errors and preventable deaths, over and over. . . .

“These deaths are marginalized because these sort of people are not valued by society,” Patricia Taylor said.When she was in the fourth grade, she dreamed of taking her brother and running away with him, protecting him. She finds it hard to accept that no one was able to protect him after he grew up.“I believe that God put these people here for a purpose, because if we didn’t have them to look after, we would lose our humanity,” she said. “How would we know compassion? It says in the Bible, do ye so unto the least of my brothers. I think that’s what it’s all about.”

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