Opponents of the “death with dignity” movement have been saying this all along. When you permit and, sadly, even encourage the notion of taking your own life when faced with terminal illness and suffering, you open a Pandora’s box of life-destroying forces that spill over into all demographics, especially those most vulnerable to the deadly siren call of self-inflicted death.
Of course, it’s impossible to tell exactly what is going on with those who make this very tragic choice, even if they leave behind a letter, because the human person is so complex and we really don’t even understand ourselves.
But, there are trends we can observe and draw conclusions from.
In cultures where suicide is more accepted, like Japan, suicide rates are, unsurprisingly, higher. This in spite of the fact that suicide brings great shame to the families left behind, which is augmented by the financial ruin that can result as well.
Life insurance policies in Japan are often voided in the case of suicide, and when people commit suicide by throwing themselves in front of trains, the train companies charge the families for the gruesome cleanup.
Yet, because Japan has this tradition of an “honorable death” through the samurai practice of “hara-kiri” (which means, “stomach cutting”), there is less of a cultural and psychological impediment to suicide, and so Japan leads the world in suicide, an ignominious achievement, to be sure.
Our Western culture actually began with a similarly positive regard for suicide. Socrates famously chose suicide rather than admitting guilt in the corruption of Athenian youth. (In fact, the elixir he used was made from Hemlock and one of the largest groups to advocate “death with dignity” is the Hemlock Society.) And suicide was a common practice in Roman culture.
What changed? As with many things, the Judeo-Christian ethics and morals that reformed Western culture established a fundamental reverence for life that is largely absent from other cultural traditions.
To be sure, we have not always practiced what we as a culture came to believe, but this concept has driven our culture to be the most “pro-life” in the history of humanity.
Of course, that tradition and the West itself is under attack from within its ranks as little more than a tyrannical relic of an oppressive patriarchy. So traditional prohibitions on things like suicide are dismissed as religious hangovers from a darker period, and various groups advocate suicide as a rational and compassionate way to deal with unbearable suffering, whether physical or mental.
As we draw back the cultural restraint on suicide, the inevitable result is that it will increase, and that is in fact what has happened. Suicide rates have increased dramatically in the past 30 years and is now the 10th leading cause of death in our country.
And as sad as it is when a celebrity like Anthony Bourdain kills himself, especially for his 11-year-old daughter, what’s even worse is when this suicidal trend begins impacting children and the elderly, people who are more vulnerable to the pernicious temptation to just end it all and be done with the suffering.
We see this sad trend in Netflix series like “Thirteen Reasons Why.” I haven’t bothered to watch it, but you don’t have to be a Ph.D. in psychology to suppose that children who watch a show about children committing suicide may be perversely inspired to follow suit.
Again, while it may be easy to make the case that a 99-year-old widower with no friends and nothing but excruciating suffering should be allowed to make his own choice about when to die, the philosophical and ethical problem is that once you’ve allowed for that principle, it quickly spreads beyond such “easy cases” and generally infects the population with a dangerous mentality.
Such a mentality says to those who suffer or are a burden on others that death is better than suffering. Soon people begin to believe that they actually do a moral wrong by NOT killing themselves and ridding loved ones of the burdens of supporting a suffering person.
Is this really the future we want to bequeath to our children?? This is indeed the unavoidable consequence of a “culture of death” which we have embraced. We can still stem the tide and re-affirm the sanctity of life. Let’s do so before it really is too late.
Trey Hoffman
Peachtree City, Ga.
