Alice Wong was a policy powerhouse in the anti-assisted suicide movement. She wielded hard data and incisive arguments with an eloquent style that spoke to national audiences new to the issue. She was unafraid to pair humor with unabashed disdain for the ableist absurdities that assisted suicide relies on, then pivot back to well-researched facts and figures. 

Alice was always pleased to be known as a data nerd but she was also a skilled communicator who understood that delivering information in an authentic and accessible way was crucial. She was an accomplished author and editor in a field she helped to define called crip-lit (a term first coined by disabled novelist Nicola Griffith), a trained health policy researcher, and a gifted community organizer who founded the Disability Visibility Project. Listing all of her projects and accolades would fill a catalog. 

Her work, including her decades of health equity activism, could be distilled into this: Alice got inside our culture’s head and messed with its foundational ideas about disability, societal values, and quality of life. She was relentless in demonstrating how ableism can’t be understood or acted upon without understanding its constant connections to generational income inequality, white supremacy, and all other types of oppression.

But she didn’t want to go in our culture’s head alone so she built ramps for disabled activists who wanted to disrupt conventional scripts about disability with her. Because she created platforms – so many platforms! – for diverse disabled voices, more people are better able to imagine what living with a disability is like beyond the presumptive desire to die rather than endure it. She understood that only constant, generous collaboration could create the critical mass of disabled voices capable of washing away the ableist scripts in people’s minds. 

This is crucial to the fight against legal assisted suicide because we know that it’s the informal, casual, and ingrained script that death is better than disability that causes us to be steered toward assisted suicide in ways that are not always formal or explicit. As an organizer, strategist, and tireless collaborator who understood steering from the inside out, Alice will be missed not only for herself, but as a unique force in disability medical ethics just when we need someone like her more than ever.