Posted: January 23, 2005
1:00 a.m. Eastern
 
 

© 2005 WorldNetDaily.com
 

Famed actor and director Clint Eastwood is being condemned by disabled groups who say his award-winning film, "Million Dollar Baby," perpetuates the view that lives of people with disabilities are not worth living.

Eastwood directs the film, in which he also acts, with Hilary Swank and Morgan Freeman. It's been identified by critics as a top contender for an Academy Award since Eastwood and Swank won Golden Globes for Best Director and Best Actress.

The story about a young female boxer who seeks out an elderly trainer to help her achieve her dream of being the best takes a sudden plot twist when one of the leading characters is seriously injured in an accident, becomes crippled and begs to be killed. Warner Brothers has been accused of deliberately concealing the film's ending in its promotions.

"Warner Brothers never tells you the truth about a key plot twist that turns this pedestrian boxing movie into an insufferable manipulative right-to-die movie," says Michael Medved, noted film critic.

The National Spinal Cord Injury Association (NSCIA) has been particularly vocal in criticizing Eastwood, describing the film's last scene as a "brilliantly executed attack on life after a spinal cord injury."

Eastwood has a history of conflict with NSCIA. In 1977, the group attempted to have $7,000 worth of handicap-access modifications included in renovations made to a hotel the actor owns in Carmel, California. Eastwood spent over $600,000 fighting the group in court, according to the London Telegraph.

"Eastwood is remembered by many for his attack on the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in 2000," charges Marcie Roth, NSCIA's CEO of the National Spinal Cord Injury Association. "I’m saddened but not surprised that he uses the power of fame and film to perpetuate his view that the lives of people with disabilities are not worth living.

Stephen Drake, a researcher for Not Dead Yet, a group that fights assisted suicide laws, calls "Million Dollar Baby" a "corny, melodramatic assault on people with disabilities. It plays out killing as a romantic fantasy and gives emotional life to the 'better dead than disabled' mindset lurking in the heart of the typical audience member."

The group is critical of reviews that have ignored or glossed over the film's pro-euthanasia message.

"The biggest problem with Million Dollar Baby," says Diane Coleman of Not Dead Yet "is that some of the audience will be newly disabled people, their family members and friends, swept along in the critically acclaimed emotion that the kindest response to someone struggling with the life changes brought on by a severe injury is, after all, to kill them."

While Eastwood has refused to discuss euthanasia when promoting his film, he's made it clear he refuses to back down. "How people feel about that is up to them," he told one interviewer. "I'm not a pro-euthanasia person and this is a story about a giant dilemma and how one person had to face that."