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January 24, 2024

Physician-assisted suicide (PAS) trades on several logical inconsistencies: that suicide is bad, except when you’re dying; that suicides don’t act responsibly, except when they’re facing death; that personal “autonomy” applies before a terminal diagnosis but not otherwise. 

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Euthanasia may be coming to a state near you.  About ten states and the District of Columbia already allow doctors to prostitute their healing profession by providing patients with lethal drugs.  Right now, there is a concerted push in Michigan (alongside, paradoxically, commercial surrogacy) to bring what is euphemistically called “physician-assisted suicide” to the Great Lake State.  My Virginia delegate proudly announced that, with a Democrat majority in Richmond, he was reintroducing legislation that would “decriminalize” suicide. 

Has anybody ever asked about the logical contradictions in this movement?

Western society has traditionally banned suicide.  Perhaps at one time the law swung to an extreme, publicly reprobating suicides, e.g., by denying them public burial.  Modern psychology has made us aware of the layers of mental factors that color a person’s acts and, therefore, his responsibility.

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That said, have we not swung to the other extreme?  Our psychologization of suicide may have reached the other extreme, where we deny human dignity by automatically assuming every suicide was “out of his mind” and, therefore, really “not responsible” for taking his life.

But, if that’s true, how then do we explain that we want to allow people facing extreme conditions — a possibly terminal diagnosis or condition — the “choice” of killing themselves?  Are they out of their minds or not?  Or, suddenly, only in the face of a potential death sentence, have they suddenly become mentally lucid?

That equivocation in what we think of suicide has consequences outside of end-of-life scenarios.  Apart from the coterie of people pushing death on the potentially dying, society as a whole does everything it can to deter suicide.  We’re not doing a good job of it, given declining life expectancies among some groups as well as the rise in both fast ends by suicide as well as slower dying by drugs and alcohol, what Dr. Stephen Doran calls “deaths of despair.”  Nor is it just old white guys; the rise in teenage suicide is alarming. 

But, our track record notwithstanding, we claim to be fighting suicide.  We have suicide hotlines.  We tell people they are “not alone.”  We do our best to discourage them.  We sometimes even institutionalize them “for their own good.”

Except in extremis, when they are facing death?

Why is suicide “bad” in all the other cases but “good” in the face of death?