Assisted Dying is Murder, and I'm Tired of Pretending It's Not

"Death with dignity" is anything but.

Ever since abortion was legalized and amidst the ever-creeping march of the pain-management system in healthcare, doctors in America have forgotten their original purpose. Medicine is no longer about healing, but about an overinflated sense of “mercy.” Nowadays, doctors (and the rest of the culture) are taught that pain is always bad and must be suppressed at all costs. “Stop screaming, let’s give you morphine…an epidural…anything to make you shut up.”

My great-great aunt is currently dying and my family members have had to keep an ultra-vigilant eye to ensure that her hospice team does not overmedicate her or hasten her death. Already, we have had to tell them to lay off the anti-anxiety medication, which she does not need nor want. Through all of this, it has become clear to me that we don’t like death, we don’t like pain, we don’t like suffering, and we especially don’t like having to watch it occur, slowly and painfully.

The New York state legislature’s passage of assisted suicide – or as they call it, Medical Assistance in Dying – is a colossal mistake wrapped in a compassionate veneer. Clearly, they have not learned from Switzerland, the Netherlands, or Canada’s errors, where death is aggressively marketed to the mentally ill, the homeless, and even cancer patients. They haven’t heard the stories of assisted suicide deaths gone wrong, where people choke to death or otherwise experience violent ends. They have forgotten the Gaswagens, which Nazis used to systematically exterminate asylum inmates and those with disabilities.

The “Sarco” suicide pod

The senators and representatives in New York have not considered that they could be turning doctors who wanted to save lives into doctors of death. They do not recognize that just because someone wants to die and even asks you to kill them does not mean you should. Just a few years ago, we put a girl in jail because she encouraged her boyfriend to commit suicide, which he proceeded to do. Now, we have laws that encourage the same abetting behavior from doctors, encourage suicidal people to give in to their disease, and no one blinks an eye.

While the American Medical Association has been on the wrong side of history before, their statement in response to New York’s heinous proposal is the correct one. According to The Wall Street Journal, the organization said that doctors acting as murderers is “fundamentally incompatible” with the role of a physician. They know that once a so-called “right to die” becomes law, denying it to vulnerable classes will become illegal. This is extremely problematic, for moral and legal reasons.

This whole fracas is an abject moral failure on the part of the West, which up until five seconds ago, was the ONLY part of the world to value life on a fundamental level. A few years ago, rapper Logic’s song “1-800-273-8255” touting the US’ suicide hotline went insanely viral, so viral that the US simplified the phone number to 988. Today, we constantly hear on social media and from the mouths of the tony class that we need to “destigmatize mental illness.”

Assisted suicide, more aptly called murder, is only serving to restigmatize mental illness. Its availability communicates to those struggling with depression, anxiety, and other maladies that things will never get better. Objectors may say that New York’s bill only covers those with terminal diagnoses who have six months left to live. And that’s true, for now. But even these limits presume too much – terminal diagnoses have been reversed before, and someone with a terminal diagnosis may go on to live longer than doctors originally predicted. Are we sure we trust doctors’ educated guesses enough to have that be the SOLE predicate on which we base our decisions to live and die? The answer of any sane person should be no.

We don’t have to dig this hole ourselves to recognize the unintended consequences that will result from this bill. Instead, we can look to other cultures where suicide is not as frowned upon, where the ultimate “un-aliving” option is not shamed nor seen as a violation of human dignity. Take South Korea, where the rate of elder suicide is astronomical. The reason many elders give for their choice? They don’t want to be a financial burden on younger relatives. They would rather live (and die) in poverty than pressure their children for help.

South Korea’s collectivist cultural mindset illustrates the uncomfortable fact that we ALL are a burden. We were a burden at birth and we will be a burden at death. In fact, we are only “not a burden” for a precious few years of our lives, when we are single, working, and off our parents’ dime. But our value is not in what we do at our day job, but who we are. No matter our financial status, race, sex, or age, we possess a fundamental, God-given right to life that cannot be taken away from us without the due process of law.

Each and every one of our declines to death is inevitable. This decline can be painful and long. But no one should be allowed to kill themselves and reject the gift of life that only God can give and take away. I fear that if we allow assisted suicide nationwide, we will quickly catch up to Canada, who is set to expand the practice to anyone suffering “solely from a mental illness” in 2027, just two short years away. May God prevent this travesty and help us recall the dignity of all humans, both born and preborn, both whole and broken.