I am updating my 2001 book, Culture of Death: The Assault on Medical Ethics in America, for a new edition to come out next year. It was first published in 2001, and so much has happened since!

In going over my files, I ran across a chapter I contributed to a book called Contemporary Perspective on Rational Suicide, edited by James Werth. I’d quite forgotten about it.

In that chapter, I decry ”rational suicide” as a form of “oppression.” From, “Rational Suicide as the New Jim Crow:”

At its core, all oppression is based on a division of human beings into different categories, some of who receive special rights and privileges or greater protection than others do…
Oppression has been predicated upon differences of race, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, religion, tribe, age and other categories that have served the purposes of the oppressors, no perhaps including state of health or happiness.
Oppression is especially insidious if formalized into law. The Jim Crow statutes…are illustrative. They…actively promoted a racist and oppressive culture by giving the states’ imprimatur to bigotry, thereby encouraging and legitimizing the overt, extralegal racism that was then common in Southern society…
So too would it be if the state created a legal right to ‘rational suicide.” Although the laws’ wording would be couched in words of compassion and liberty, language, such as “separate but equal,” does not always mean what it says. By making “rational suicide” a legally recognized and enforcable right, the underlying message would be for the state to proclaim that all human lives are not of equal inherent moral worth, that some of us (the healthy, able-bodied, and relatively happy) are people whose lives are of such little us that their deaths are best for all concerned.
The impact of this legalized healthism would be no different from the consequences that flowed from institutionalizing racism in the law–it would just create a new category of culling humans into privileged and oppressed classes, thereby influencing cultural outlook as well as impacting upon the state’s legal obligations toward its citizens.

I wrote that in 1998. And so it is coming to pass, Alas.