Assisted suicide gathers steam

The drive for assisted suicide continues to gather momentum across North America. For example, a bill to legalize assisted suicide is now moving through the legislature of Pennsylvania, a state that voted for Trump in 2024. It is already legal in Canada and in 14 U.S. states, including New York and California. Once assisted suicide is legalized for people near death, it tends to expand, becoming available for people who are not near death. In Canada today this is not a prediction but a reality. Originally approved for terminally ill people, it is now available for those with chronic conditions, and the plan is to expand it to the mentally ill next year. The absurdity of it is captured in this headline: “Canada told mentally ill must be euthanized lest they kill themselves.” Although assisted suicide has only been legal in Canada for less than a decade, it already accounts for 5% of all deaths.

It has gotten so out of control that the government of Alberta has become the first province to consider a bill designed to limit assisted suicide to the terminally ill. But this is an uphill battle once the door has been opened to viewing death as a solution to life’s problems. Why is the slippery slope so slippery?

The criterion of personal autonomy embedded in the concept of “assisted suicide” is supposed to make it different from euthanasia. The difference is who gets to make the decision: the patient or someone else. Modern people tend to value the autonomy of the individual self as their highest value. If something advances individual autonomy, it must be good. The problem is that individual autonomy is quickly replaced by bureaucratic decision-making based on a utilitarian calculus.

Assisted suicide is sold as a solution to the problem of overwhelming pain at the end of life. Basically, it is an appeal to fear of suffering helplessly. We are particularly susceptible to this fear today because modern society has been so successful in eliminating hardship and pain from our lives. Our technology shapes us and changes the nature of our fears. We are conditioned to think that we should never have to endure pain and so we fear the possibility of unrelieved pain at the end of life. The campaign to legalize assisted suicide preys on this fear.

However, once the idea becomes embedded in our consciousness that we can protect ourselves against pain by choosing assisted suicide, the nature of assisted suicide itself begins to change in our minds. It goes from (1) absolutely wrong and unthinkable to (2) a possibility to be taken seriously to (3) a solution to a problem to (4) a positive good. This change in our perception of assisted suicide is supported by the increased social acceptance of it all around us. Its legalization and widespread practice tend to drive people in one of two directions, either toward gradual acceptance of it as a good thing, or as an evil to be fought with all our might. The point is that it is difficult to live in a society where assisted suicide is common and remain indifferent to it. The practice of assisted suicide changes a society, and it changes us as individuals.

Once assisted suicide comes to be regarded as a positive good by a critical mass in society it becomes entirely rational to impose it on those who are unable to choose it for themselves. Individual autonomy and informed consent get the ball rolling, but once the ball picks up enough momentum it is pushed forward by a kind of perverted humanitarian impulse that sees it as kindness. The Canadian doctor in this clip rightly terms it “therapeutic nihilism.”

The real slippery slope is not merely that increasing numbers of people are euthanized every year for an increasing number of reasons, such as mental illness, disability, depression, or just plain choice. This is really and truly a slippery slope. But we need to understand that the practice of assisted suicide itself changes society. It makes death more thinkable as a solution to social problems. We are sliding down a moral slippery slope toward a state of indifference to the value of an individual human life. We are being corrupted as people.

Ironically, what was originally justified on the basis of individual autonomy becomes the justification for society treating individuals as those whose life is worthless and can be ended when a committee decides it is for the best. The real danger of the slippery slope is not just that a lot of people get killed, but that we become the kind of people for whom killing is routine—and even good.