Assisted Suicide Laws Fueling a Culture of Death
Attempts to legalize assisted suicide and euthanasia are underway in several countries around the world. This includes France, the United Kingdom, Italy, and Ireland. Unfortunately, the pro-death movement seems to be gaining a certain amount of momentum.
Just a few days ago, however, citizens of one country where lawmakers had already legalized assisted suicide pushed back. In a national referendum, over 53% of Slovenian citizens voted against legalizing assisted suicide.
In July, the Slovenian parliament had approved a law permitting assisted suicide. However, a counter-effort led by conservative politician Ales Primc successfully gathered 46,000 signatures to put the issue to a referendum. This exceeded the 40,000 signatures needed to force the issue.
“We are witnessing a miracle. The culture of life has defeated the cult of death,” Primc said after the vote.
The referendum is the final say on the issue, meaning that lawmakers cannot attempt to bring the issue back for another vote.
“Good for the voters of Slovenia,” stated American bioethicist and anti-assisted suicide campaigner Wesley Smith. “They’ve demonstrated that the death agenda can be stopped.”
Smith added an interesting post-script: “I have long believed that the more people learn about assisted suicide, the less they support it. This campaign fits that presumption.”
I think Smith is on to something.
Public Awareness Eroding Support for Assisted Suicide
In the past year or two, we have been hearing more and more stories about the flagrant, and often-horrifying abuses that occur once assisted suicide and euthanasia are legalized.
It’s not necessarily that there are many more such abuses taking place. Anyone who has followed the issue knows that such abuses have long been rampant in Belgium and the Netherlands. The Orwellian term “involuntary euthanasia” (i.e., murder) often comes up in discussions about their euthanasia regimes.
However, stories of such abuses tended not to get a lot of attention in the press. Typically, only well-educated pro-life activists knew just how common it was for people to be euthanized against their will, or to be heavily pressured into taking their own lives.
But now that more nations are considering legalizing so-called MAiD (medical assistance in dying), more media and ordinary citizens are taking an active interest in the issue.
And what they are finding is horrifying: numerous instances of disabled people choosing death because they have been denied necessary medical procedures or decent living arrangements; veterans suffering PTSD being offered assisted suicide before being offered legitimate health care; elderly individuals choosing suicide after being abandoned by their children, or out of a fear of loneliness or being a burden; and on and on.
Of course, any assisted suicide or euthanasia is an abuse of medical power and authority (and never morally permissible, see Catechism of the Catholic Church, nos. 2276-2279). Medicine is and must remain the practice of healing, not killing. God is the author of life, not doctors or even the sick person.
However, while MAiD is intrinsically gravely evil in all circumstances, it is also true that these practices are especially horrific when people are strong-armed into ending their lives, or when a society turns its back on the sick, elderly, or disabled, offering them the cheap and convenient “treatment” of death, rather than exerting effort and compassion to meet people in their suffering.
The Dark Realities Behind Legal Euthanasia
However, it’s not just such abuses that are alarming. There’s also just the more sinister fact that once you normalize death as a “solution,” more and more people are drawn towards utilizing this “solution.” Suddenly, suicide becomes a “normal” way to die. And thus, a culture is changed, dramatically, from top to bottom.
Just a few days ago, for instance, international media reported on the deaths of the German entertainers Alice and Ellen Kessler. These twin sisters, who were born in Nazi Germany, became internationally famous singers and dancers. They performed alongside musicians such as Frank Sinatra and Fred Astaire.
The pair, who were 89 years old, died by assisted suicide on the same day, Monday, Nov. 17, at their home. So far as I can tell, neither of them was terminally ill. Instead, it seems, they decided that it was time to die, together.
As it turns out, the Kesslers’ double assisted suicide is not the first such case. As the headline of a recent article in The European Conservative (TEC) article asks, “When Did Double Suicides Become Trendy?“
The article documents numerous such cases, often involving couples where either one or both of the members were not suffering any terminal illness.
This includes the case of a Belgian couple, 89-year-old Francis and 86-year-old Anne, who opted for joint assisted suicide. Neither Francis nor Anne were terminally ill, although Anne had been diagnosed with dementia. When the couple’s own doctor refused to approve the assisted suicide, their 55-year-old son very helpfully went doctor-shopping and found a doctor willing to kill his aged parents.
The Media’s Dangerous Romanticization of Assisted Suicide
A few weeks before, the famed Holocaust survivor Ruth Posner and her husband killed themselves via assisted suicide, despite the fact that neither of them was terminally ill.
The BBC reported on another case, under the headline, “Dying together: Why a happily married couple decided to stop living.” The story recounts the case of Jan and Els, a couple who had been married for nearly 50 years. After Els was diagnosed with dementia, however, the couple decided to end their lives together.
The Netherlands tracks such “couple suicides.” There were thirty-three such cases in 2023.
As Jonathon Van Maren notes, “The glamorization of double suicides has been deliberate, with ‘death with dignity’ activists pushing fairytale endings.” However, he notes, the son of Jan and Els had asked his parents not to go through with the double-suicide. The media, notes Van Maren, “could have done a profile on the bereft son, heartbroken that his parents denied his family more time, but facing overwhelming cultural pressure to affirm their ‘autonomy’ and ‘choice.’”
“The strategy is obvious,” concludes Van Maren, “to propagandize the public into accepting, if not celebrating, our ‘new normal,’ in which elderly couples are put down like household pets, doctors dispense lethal injections that remain illegal for convicted murderers, and the value of life is dictated by its subjective ‘quality.’”
Nazi Comparisons to MAiD
There is something especially tragic about survivors of Nazi Germany, such as the Kessler sisters and Posner, dying with the assistance of the medical system.
Euthanasia and assisted suicide were core elements of the Nazi’s eugenic worldview. Under the Nazi’s infamous T4 program, those deemed “lesser” or “useless” were simply killed. This included children born with disabilities, the elderly, and the mentally ill. Hitler spoke of such individuals as “life unworthy of life.”
Now, it seems, this eugenic mentally is rapidly spreading. Even Germany has taken a giant step backwards to its eugenic history, after its Federal Constitutional Court legalized assisted suicide in 2020. You would think the Germans would know better.
Now, in Canada, the National Post reports on troubling cases of assisted suicide involving elderly people with dementia.
Recently the Office of the Ontario Chief Coroner’s MAiD Death Review Committee flagged several cases of MAiD involving dementia. One case involved an 80-year-old woman, who was killed by a doctor after a family member brought forward a request for assisted suicide for the woman.
Under Canadian law, a person who is being killed via assisted suicide must be able to consent to their death on the day it occurs. According to the Post, the person administering the assisted suicide deemed that the 80-year-old woman was able to consent “based on her ability to repeat a question and squeeze the provider’s hand.”
If that seems flimsy to you, it’s because it is. The review committee notes that there were 103 MAiD deaths of people with dementia in Ontario in 2023 and 2024.
One of the members of the review committee noted that people with dementia were in some cases choosing assisted suicide because of a fear of being a burden, or because of fear or emotional distress.
Ethical Breakdown
While MAiD is usually defended on the basis of “autonomy” and “choice” (the same language used to defend abortion), dementia presents a serious challenge to this framework. As Canada is now beginning to experience and has long been the case in the Netherlands and Belgium, the “solution” in many cases is for doctors and regulators simply to turn a blind eye to cases of “involuntary” euthanasia.
Often, these cases involve a family member asking that their elderly relative be euthanized. This is precisely what happened in the case of the 80-year-old woman noted above. The report noted that the woman was unable to sign her own consent form. The Post reports, “Some members [of the committee] were also concerned about the reliance on a family member ‘to facilitate the MAiD process, illustrating potential opportunity for undue influence.’”
Situations like these, which are extremely common in euthanasia-friendly nations, are extremely common. However, they are fraught with potential perverse incentives, since such family members often stand to inherit from the deceased, or simply to avoid the hard work of carrying for an elderly relative.
Death Leads to Death
Mental health experts have known for decades that suicide is socially contagious. If one young person in a social circle commits suicide, the likelihood that another member of the same social group will do the same is significantly increased.
This is why media organizations follow certain practices to minimize the social contagion effect. When reporting on suicides, or even on a movie that depicts suicide, newspapers will typically include the phone number to a suicide hotline.
I have often written in this column that “death leads to death.” We’ve known this for a long time in relation to the social contagion effect and suicide.
The legalization of MAiD, however, supercharges the social contagion effect. Double assisted suicides used to be unheard of. Now that they are receiving fawning attention in the media, they are becoming common.
The Past Culture of Life
In the past, families lovingly cared for their relatives with dementia until death. Now, it is becoming increasingly common to hear of children suggesting that their parents simply end their lives. It is, in other words, becoming “acceptable.”
It used to be the case that parents expected to be cared for well into their old age. Now, there is a subtle, but increasing pressure, for ill or elderly parents to spare their children all that hard work and press the “exit” button.
It used to be the case that hospitals, doctors, and social workers would do everything in their power to help the sick or disabled live with dignity. Now, they are increasingly becoming accustomed to broaching the subject of “death with dignity” with those in difficult circumstances.
In this way, the pressure to “choose” death gradually gets ratcheted up. Choosing death becomes common practice, a well-trod path, the cheap and easy way to solve difficult problems, or to avoid suffering. In many cases, people are not even aware of the way that a change of a law subtly transforms their principles and expectations over time, until something that was previously unfathomable becomes the norm.
The Realities of Euthanasia Culture
This is how consciences are deadened. This is how the courage and resilience of people to face difficult circumstances, or to seek and implement creative solutions to hard problems, is eroded. Rather than love, care, effort, long-suffering, and courage, our culture begins to celebrate the easy way out.
Then it becomes “romantic” to kill yourself with a loved one. It becomes “courageous” to spare your children the hard work of loving you in your old age, by shuffling off your mortal coil before your time. And it becomes “reasonable” to pressure the sick, the homeless, the mentally ill, and others, to end their lives, and thus to spare their family, health care systems, and others, the inconveniences of their continued living.
Death is not a solution. The Slovenian people knew better than their legislators, and they pushed back. This is a sign of great hope. As Wesley Smith noted, when people learn the reality of assisted suicide and euthanasia, they turn against it.
Let us continue to do our part by pushing back against the white-washed narratives sometimes found in the media. Tell the truth. And pray that other peoples show the same courage and good sense as the Slovenians.
Human Life International
As president of Human Life International, Fr. Boquet is a leading expert on the international pro-life and family movement, having journeyed to nearly 90 countries on pro-life missions over the last decade. Father Boquet works with pro-life and family leaders in 116 counties that partner with HLI to proclaim and advance the Gospel of Life. Read his full bio here.
The Blessed Virgin Mary and the Incomparable Value of Human Life