The Dangerous Allure of Assisted Suicide

N ew York is just the latest to jump on the assisted-death bandwagon.

Looked at one way, it makes sense that more and more governments are legalizing forms of assisted suicide. The moral prohibition on suicide is a Christian one, and we are many, many generations into the project of liberating people from those strictures we identify with churchy people or with superstitions about the soul and its status. Our parents want to make their own choices. Old age and illness inflict serious humiliations upon us and even threaten us with pain. Why not allow people to choose the terms of one of the most personal things they will undergo, death itself?

On the other hand, I am absolutely amazed that people can’t see where this is going, and quickly. First, it’s obvious that medically assisted death is initially justified by an appeal to help end the final agony of those who are terminally ill. But people actually undergoing their final agony before death don’t usually ask for suicide; they ask for painkillers and for the presence of loved ones, or at least a sympathetic caregiver. Since there is little demand among those who are truly on death’s door, this “dignity” is expanded to those with a terminal diagnosis, with uncured depression, or who suffer from an excessive fear of the pains and humiliations of old age.

The razing of the taboo and moral prohibition against suicide doesn’t just open up new fields of free action in which free actors make free choices. Instead, a new morality is established, with new duties. When people justify to themselves and to others why they are choosing medically assisted suicide, they almost invariably cite a reason for doing so. They phrase it in two ways. First, they dread the loss of autonomy that is involved with great advanced age, advanced disease, or terminal illness. Secondly, they don’t want to inconvenience others. A study of people who qualified for Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) in Canada showed that barely half of those requesting suicide cited a symptom of their terminal illness in the top two reasons for their request. Instead, psychological factors predominated — answers like “loss of autonomy” and “loss of control.” Others cited the fear of being a “burden” on loved ones, whether financial or emotional.

We are establishing these new felt-duties — the duty to be autonomous and “not a burden” on others — exactly when we are entering a phase in which the generations entering their senior years were the first to have reliable access to birth control, and so, consequently, made choices that ensured their needs in old age would fall on fewer children and grandchildren. Since these choices were widespread, it means a dearth of nieces and nephews, too. The United States has added programs like Social Security precisely because, in the past, our forebears found the sight of the elderly falling into destitution intolerable. They felt some collective duty to protect against this, since of course some would be under-supported through no fault or choice of their own.

Maybe these morbid “duties” to not be a burden are arising because the elderly can feel in their bones a reduced connection to the young. Anticipating that they’ve weakened the duty to care for their elderly, they have opened a door to shorten the time in which they reap what they have sown, a time of great loneliness, feeling abandoned to institutions that will prey upon their life savings.

I feel nothing but a chill. The establishment of a duty not to be burdensome in a society with legal suicide and our upside-down demographics is a recipe for mass murder. Worse still, because such a society will have its heartlessness revealed to it, the will to reform and rebuild, and to make burdens again, will be further weakened. We all have a choice: Start building a counter-culture of life right now, or keep pretending we’re not presently ascending the great pyre.