Lillibeth Navarro, Filipina using a motorized wheelchair, wearing a red long-sleeved dress and black summer sandals. She wears her dark brown hair medium length and straight. She has red lipstick on, some make up on her Olive skin and purple sunglasses.

Founder & Executive Director, Communities Actively Living Independent & Free

ORGANIZATIONAL PLAINTIFF

Lillibeth Navarro

Lillibeth Navarro, Founder & Executive Director of CALIF, the independent living center serving the 50 zip codes of Los Angeles currently serves on the Personal Assistance Services Council (PASC) as officer-at-large and part of the Executive Committee.  In 2009, the CA Speaker of the House, Karen Bass, appointed her to the California Commission on Disability Access where she was named Chair of the Accessibility Enhancement Committee. Her appointment was confirmed by Assembly Speaker John Perez in January 2011.

Statement

CALIF is the independent living center serving the Central and South LA area of Southern California. We’re joining the lawsuit because THE EOLOA poses a direct threat to the Disability Rights Movement and constitutionally, a direct threat to our lives as persons with disabilities whose vulnerabilities can just happen quickly, without any warning. When that happens under the EOLOA, we are coached to die and rarely inspired to live.

We at CALIF have as our mission to honor and preserve our historic patrimony directly threatened by the untimely demise of our heroes and founders with disabilities.  It was their experience of adversity and disability that compelled them to recreate the external environment for the entire family to access and use. Their contributions are tearing down the barriers to total participation in all aspects of mainstream life. Today the disabled are in schools, in space, in science and industry, the arts and other fields, too.

The EOLOA cheapens our value as human beings whose lives are too expensive to save, enhance and preserve. It relegates us as lower beings like sick pets incapable of contributing to the human family even in its disabled state. We already see the foreboding atmosphere:  It is this mindset that dangerously includes us as inconvenient human refuse to the goal of “climate change”. Getting rid of us through the notion of “our death being our choice” makes it even convenient to replace us with the supposed perfect Artificial Intelligence. It won’t be long before we are replaced with the utilitarian AI. The EOLOA makes it meritorious to save the planet instead of saving us, the mindset that chooses to euthanize the disabled human being rather than give them the right amount of pain medication and care so they can thrive and live.

Instead, when we are “assisted to kill ourselves” as members of the human family, we lose life’s immense possibilities for exploring new and exciting horizons like Assistive Technology and other technologies in transportation, communication and a host of other fields.  “Assisted to die” is not a choice when the supports to live are generously given and plentiful.

Lillibeth Navarro

How do you pronounce your name?

Lillibeth (Lilli like the flower, lilly, and beth like Lady MacBeth) Navarro (Nav like navigate and arro like narrow).

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