You are depressed because you are sick, very sick.
"I could always help you die," your doctor says.
You've lost your sight. Overwhelmed by the trauma, you lose all hope.
Your doctor pats you on the hand and says, in a gentle voice, "Why don't we talk about assisted dying?"
Something sound wrong about this? It should. They call it "dying with dignity," but its anything but that. And it's coming to a healthcare provider near you.
To better educate you on this practice, this article will provide a basic introduction to assisted suicide by covering the following topics:
Introduction to assisted suicide: What is it?
The growing popularity of assisted suicide
The appalling evil of assisted suicide
Introduction to Assisted Suicide
1. Introduction to assisted suicide: What is it?
Assisted suicide is when one person helps another person end his life through suicide. Most frequently, the suicidal person suffers from a serious sickness or medical condition which serves as the driving force behind the suicidal desire (more about this later).
The person assisting can be a doctor (called "physician assisted suicide"), some other medical professional (like a nurse), or even a family member, loved one, or friend.
Generally, the means of death is through an overdose of medication. While a doctor prescribes the medication, he may or may not actually administer it to the patient.
"Euthanasia" is sometimes used as a synonym for assisted suicide and can cover all of its various forms. The word comes from Greek and means "good death." The idea is that it is better to die by suicide than by a terminal illness, such as cancer.
Proponents also refer to assisted suicide as "mercy killing," "assisted dying," or "dying with dignity." These terms tend to disguise what is actually going on—the killing of one human being by another—and therefore should be avoided.[1]
2. The Growing Popularity of Assisted Suicide
Assisted suicide’s popularity is growing in North America. Canada passed a law in 2015 legalizing the procedure. Later, it removed mandatory waiting periods and allowed assisted suicide in the case of mental illness, including depression. As a result, people were being put to death for things like vision or hearing loss and diabetes.[2]
From 2016 to 2022, 44,958 people were put to death through assisted suicide, and in 2022, it was the fifth leading cause of death in Canada.[3] See the table below for a yearly breakdown.
Source: Statista. Link here.
This form of death is gaining steam in the U.S., as well. Per Americans United for Life, as of 2024, assisted suicide is legal in following eleven jurisdictions[4]:
California, Colorado, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Montana, Maine, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington.
3. The Monstrous Evil of Assisted Suicide
Despite the arguments of proponents, there is no way to get around the fact that assisted suicide requires one human being to kill or help kill another. In the end, therefore, it is simply another form of murder.
It seems almost unnecessary to state God's unequivocal rejection of murder, but for thoroughness' sake, consider Exodus 20:13, Deuteronomy 5:17, 1 Timothy 1:19, and Revelation 21:8. The details of the biblical position on assisted suicide will be covered in a separate article. For now, the focus will be on U.S. law.
U.S. Law and Assisted Suicide
Historically, the U.S. Supreme Court has upheld that assisted suicide was murder. In a 1997 Case (Washington v. Glucksberg; a pdf copy is provided at the end of this article), the Court affirmed a state’s right to outlaw this act.
In that ruling, Chief Justice William Rehnquist (see photo) cited Commonwealth v. Mink (1877) to show that U.S. law has always viewed assisted suicide in this manner:
Now if the murder of oneself is a felony, the accessory is equally guilty as if he had aided and abetted in the murder.[5]
Regarding the legality of assisted suicide, the Court stated:
That suicide remained a grievous wrong is confirmed by the fact that colonial and early state legislatures and courts did not retreat from prohibiting assisted suicide.
Swift...in his treatise on the laws of Connecticut, stated that "if one counts as another to commit suicide and the other person by reason of the advice kills himself the adviser is guilty of murder as principle."
The Court also addressed assisting a suicide among the terminally ill:
And the prohibitions against assisting suicide never contained exceptions for those who were near death.
Rather, "the life of those to whom life had become a burden--of those who were hopelessly diseased or fatally wounded—may even the lives of criminals condemned to death, were under the protection of the law equally as...those who were in the full tide of life's enjoyment..."
The Greater Evil
And herein lies the even greater evil of this practice. The laws of a nation are supposed to protect those who by virtue of mental health, sickness, or life situation cannot protect themselves. But assisted suicide, by definition, does the very opposite.
It is important to note that the driver for the desire to engage in assisted suicide is not the pain of the disease from which one is suffering. It is in the depression that the disease brings about.
Rehnquist addresses this in his 1997 opinion when he writes:
Those who attempt suicide, terminally ill or not, often suffer from depression or other mental disorders. More than 95% of those who commit suicide had a major psychiatric illness at the time of death; among the terminally ill, uncontrolled pain is a risk factor because it contributes to depression.
Intolerable physical symptoms are not the reason most patients request physician assisted suicide or euthanasia. Research indicates that many people who request physician assisted suicide withdraw that request if their depression and pain are treated. [emphasis added]
And, as anyone who has experienced depression can attest, people in this state are patently unable to make clear, rational decisions, especially of this magnitude. This is why we try to talk people off the ledge when they want to jump. We know their desire to die in that moment is irrational.
Therefore, when a doctor, or anyone else, helps a depressed person end his life, he is murdering someone at their most vulnerable time. He is saying, in effect, to the man getting ready to jump off the bridge, "If you ask me, I will throw you off the bridge myself."
This makes assisted suicide an even greater evil than it might first appear. The person with the clear mind, the one in the responsible position (the doctor, friend, or loved one), submits to the one who is mentally compromised and kills them.
Summary
Assisted suicide is not the act of mercy it is purported to be. When all the cleverly worded platitudes are wiped away, it is one person killing another person. Moreover, the person making the request, due to their deep depression, is in an extremely vulnerable state and is not capable of making a life and death decisions.
This makes participating in the practice in any form a great evil against God and our fellow man. For this reason (among others), it is critical that Christians become educated and actively fight all forms of assisted suicide that are proposed and carried out in a society.
OTHER RESOURCES:
*Please use these in your preaching and teaching ministry.
The full text of Washington v Glucksberg is provided below. Key points are highlighted in yellow, and heading notes are added in places in the margin.
For more information on assisted suicide in the U.S., see the Americans United for Life website: https://aul.org/physician-assisted-suicide/.
NOTES:
[1] Changing words to hide the wickedness of actions is a common strategy of Satan and the godless.
This can be seen in the terms "pro-choice" instead of "abortion," "gay" instead of "homosexual," "transgender" instead of "transvestite," and "sex worker" instead of "prostitute," among others.
Christians should resist this kind of alteration of terms and only use those that truly reflect the morality of the actions themselves.
[2] “Welcome to Canada, the Doctor Will Kill You Now,” by Nicholas Tomaino, Sept. 2, 2024. https://www.wsj.com/opinion/welcome-to-canada-the-doctor-will-kill-you-now-maid-euthanasia-foley-29ce77e0.
[3] Same as previous.
[4] Americans United for Life, https://aul.org/physician-assisted-suicide/.
[5] Washington v. Glucksberg, 1997. The Supreme Court of the United States. https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep521/usrep521702/usrep521702.pdf.