Haben Girma is the first deafblind person to graduate from Harvard Law School. She is also a past recipient of the Helen Keller Achievement Award and was named by former President Barack Obama a White House Champion of Change. Her mere presence onstage or on camera is powerful in itself; after all, most of us struggle through the meagerest of disadvantages in order to carve out a life of satisfaction and meaning. But when she speaks, and one gets a sense of the richness of her intellect and spirit, she becomes something more, something like a living and breathing miracle.

Now, Girma is part of a legal team waging a battle to protect the disabled from California’s End of Life Option Act, which in their view, lacks protections against ableism and racism. Passed in 2016 and signed into law by former Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown, the EOLOA allows terminally ill adults to obtain and self-administer “aid-in-dying” drugs. But according to Girma and her team, the EOLOA, in practice, is deeply corrupted by discriminatory beliefs about disabled persons, and the law’s standards for “terminal illness” are outrageously low and ripe for manipulation. So, they have filed a lawsuit challenging its constitutionality on behalf of various groups and individuals with disabilities and nonprofit organizations that work for disability and patient rights.

The suit contends that EOLOA violates the Americans with Disabilities Act, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, and even the U.S. Constitution itself. Under the EOLOA, they argue, only people with life-threatening disabilities who claim to want to die can legally procure an assisted suicide from the state of California. This, in their view, amounts not to mercy but to a covert form of eugenics. And since viable alternatives to state-assisted suicide are often withheld from the disabled, especially those who are poor minorities, the “choice” afforded by the EOLOA is an illusion. Instead, the disabled are often presented with the “choice” to die in order to rid themselves of a life that, according to the state of California, is not really worth living in the first place.

In addition, the plaintiffs contend that the standards for “terminal illness” are laughably malleable and often come as a result of misdiagnosis and ignorance of what makes life meaningful. Michael Bien of Rosen, Bien, Galven & Grunfeld LLP, who is also representing the group in the lawsuit, describes the standards as “Orwellian” since anyone who wants to die can be considered terminally ill. Indeed, even an individual who self-reports suffering from depression can be considered “terminally ill” under the law, which renders the standards as circular and pointless in and of themselves.

In a video released by the group last week, Girma recounts the story of two young deaf twins named Mark and Eddy in Belgium who were losing their eyesight and were scared of becoming both blind and deaf. They went to their doctor and asked to die. The doctors agreed and gave them a lethal injection. The story haunts Girma because she wishes the twins had been told of all the ways their lives could remain rich, as hers undoubtedly is, and of how deafblind people can be taught to communicate and connect. But in her view, most communities have doctors who are not only ignorant to the richness of disabled life, but offer nothing in the way of care due to deeply engrained ableism. Indeed, in Germa’s own life, she’d been misdiagnosed by a Harvard-trained doctor who told her she’d never be able to read when she’d already been reading braille for years.

But above all, the group challenging California’s law wants to make it clear that disabled lives are worth living. This is a radical message in our secular country that increasingly measures the value of life in units of consumption and production. While the group appears firmly rooted in the language of the postmodern Left and does not currently have any members from pro-life organizations, its message ought to attract allies from religious conservative America.

“Ableism,” Girma says, “is the secret belief, or sometimes not-so-secret belief, that disabled lives are not worth living. Some people may be thinking: but, we want to be able to choose when we end our life. When the state fails to provide access to services, when insurance fails to cover important care, when doctors can’t tell you how to communicate … how to live a rich, full life as a disabled person, then that’s not really a choice.”

Hear, hear.

Peter Laffin is a contributor at the Washington Examiner and the founder of Crush the College Essay. His work has also appeared in RealClearPolitics, the Catholic Thing, the National Catholic Register, and the American Spectator.