Assisted Suicide: What Sort of Society Do We Wish to Be?

A society that accepts assisted suicide needs to be aware that there are certain consequences it must face.  The issue is not only a matter of an individual facing extreme challenges and wanting to end his or her life.  The issue is also about what kind of people we wish to be: those who help the suffering end their lives or those who help and comfort the suffering?  What we say about assisting others in suicide, in other words, is also about who we are and what we wish to be. 

Two of the outcomes of a permissive society that endorses euthanasia are the increase in suicides and an abuse of the system.  In a December, 2024 article in the National Post, Miranda Schreiber provided the recent statistics about assisted suicide in Canada:

Health Canada’s Fifth Annual Report on Medical Assistance in Dying [MAID] in Canada last week revealed that over 15,300 Canadians died by MAID in 2023, representing a 15.8 per cent increase in deaths from the previous year. In 2023, MAID accounted for 4.7 per cent of deaths in Canada.^[2]

Also, 622 of the deaths were for non-terminal illnesses. A survey of this group revealed that 47.1% listed as one of the reasons for requesting assisted suicide was their loneliness and isolation, while almost half stated that they did not want to be a burden to family, friends, and caregivers.  These are particular concerns for the elderly: the median age for assisted suicide was 77.7 years.

In Quebec, 7.2% of the deaths are by assisted suicide, and in British Columbia, 6.1% are. 

The concerns about abuses in assisted suicide in Canada are based on

reports of MAID being used in prisons while incarcerated people were shackled to their beds, the program’s lack of legal oversight, disproportionate representation of impoverished people receiving assisted suicide, and health-care practitioners offering assisted suicide when patients asked for support for living.

In an open letter, more than 100 Christian, Muslim, Jewish, and Sikh women representing various groups in the United Kingdom and Wales have warned that assisted dying could become a new tool to use against marginalised persons, especially women.  Lesley Storey, the chief executive of My Sister’s Place, has warned that women in abusive relationships and seeking to end their lives are at risk of coercion to do so.  Personal choice in the matter of assisted suicide is not something that exists apart from other relational dynamics, and the threat of coercion from the perpetrators of abuse is real.  The letter says,

It is the voices of the unheard, ignored, and marginalised that we are compelled by our faith traditions and scriptures to listen and draw attention to, in the pursuit of good law-making for the common good – legislation that considers and protects the most vulnerable, not just those who speak loudest.

The author of a bill in Parliament to introduce assisted dying in the UK, MP Kim Leadbetter, argues that women should be empowered to have autonomy over their own bodies throughout their lives and at the end of life.  This approach to moral issues is a feature of contemporary, Western ethics.  In seeking to give individuals their freedom of choice, people shirk their own responsibilities, and the more they insist on this when people are vulnerable and need others, the worse the outcome.  The catastrophe of assisted suicide in such situations is not a triumph for freedom but is a failure of social and relational responsibility.  Branding this as an issue about freedom and women’s rights, with the tired old mantra about women having autonomy over their own bodies, moreover, is political chicanery.  Such language unites the issue of suicide with abortion, and both acts are ultimately not about autonomy but about commandeering social assistance for one’s choices.  The Graeco-Roman view of suicide as a courageous act has become an appeal for assistance from others, but assistance to end rather than endure suffering by ending life itself.

In countries with government-supported, national health plans, assisted suicide could eerily become directed and provided for by a government agency, like MAID in Canada.  During the United Kingdom’s debates on assisted suicide in 2025, the question was legitimately asked whether a national death service might be set up, involving the National Health Service and the judicial system.  Furthermore, doctors and nurses whose involvement in care for the sick or psychologically disturbed would be required to participate in assisted suicide—as already seen in the case of abortion.  Another question is whether legislation that introduces this practice into the health care system in only a few situations might not increasing be extended to other situations.  If, for example, at first the requirement for providing assisted suicide is limited to terminally ill patients with six months to live, one could see this time extended when patients in the same condition requested help to die after six months of suffering.  If persons with physical issues are assisted in dying, why not others with mental issues, and why not still others who are lonely—as in Canada?

Concern over government becoming involved in the first place with suicide is legitimate.  By definition, government is an institutional power over the lives of citizens.  A government that compassionately extends health care to suffering citizens is not merely caring for its citizens but is also exercising a benevolent power over them.  Equally, government health care that enters into the discussion of assisted suicide introduces into the matter of institutional power.  While advocates of assisted suicide might claim that it is right to give individuals power over their own bodies, government health care introduces the new angle of institutional power into the practice.  One should be alert to how the institution may extend its use of power as a compassionate service to mandated suicide in the interests of society. 

If Iceland can brag about how it has no people with Downs Syndrome because it aborts such babies, why could a government not argue that it should eliminate suffering for the elderly, terminally ill, and persons with certain psychological disorders through ‘assisted suicide’, which may become mandated suicide?  The reality is that institutions do not have compassion.  Individuals have compassion and can construe their acts rightly or wrongly as compassionate.  Agencies and governments have policies that contribute to practices that might be compassionate, but they operate by rules and policies.

Moreover, governments have conflicting motives.  Claiming compassion or any other positive motivation, they also operate with concerns over insurance and medical costs.  They are institutions, not humans offering care.  Legal guidance and guardrails intending to be compassionate are not the same as showing a person compassion.  An objective judge is not a caring friend.  One might reflect that, while suicide was practiced in antiquity, it was not a practice of government or other institutions.  The modern proposals of governmental involvement in assisted suicide cannot be guided by practices in antiquity.  The historical precedent of government involvement with assisted suicide is, actually, Nazi Germany.  The goal, of course, would be to offer death without repeating the errors of Germany in the first part of the twentieth century.  Yet citizens ought to be concerned over this modern notion of government involvement in the death of its citizens.

The roles people and agencies play are different.  One person’s courage in suicide might require a different virtue in another, a loved one’s compassion.  An agency might have the goal of monetary gain for providing such assistance, like abortion clinics.  Agencies and institutions might also claim to be acting on ideological grounds, like protecting freedom of choice, individualism, rights, safety, and so forth.  A government offering national health care might have the goal of cutting costs to its own budget by reducing the number of persons receiving ongoing care.  Also, an individual may be seen as courageous in choosing suicide, but does the individual have hidden motivations, perhaps ones not even understood by himself or herself?  Could an invalid or elderly person choose suicide so as not to burden the family caretakers?  Perhaps the so-called courageous elderly person without long to live needs a more compassionate friend to be with rather than the person turning his or her compassion into assisting the person in suicide.  Might someone even be motivated to commit suicide in order to have his or her organs donated to someone else, and could such a practice, once introduced, then become coercive—the harvesting of organs?  Since suicide is more noticeable in certain parts of the world, why would some entrepreneurs without moral standards not see this as a lucrative industry?

A society desiring assisted suicide brings various motivations, people, and groups together with different moral arguments and purposes all toward the same end.  The issue is complex, and it also differs from person to person.  Not everyone involved has the same moral purposes despite the arguments publicly made about compassionate care, freedom of choice, women’s rights, and so on.  Moreover, what is clear in all this is that the argument has shifted from the honour society of ancient Rome to the clerically guided society offering pastoral care in suffering to the modern society providing clinical and institutional care that is concerned to avoid suffering to the government’s involvement in assisted suicide. 

What understanding of suffering shifts arguments from care to the ending of life?  Is physical incapacity and pain the same as psychological pain or anxiety?  Even further, what philosophical or theological understanding of suffering and of life itself leads to an acceptance of suicide, assisted suicide, or, more darkly, encouraged or mandated ‘suicide’ for certain populations? 

Indeed, providing a way for individuals to commit suicide says something about who we are as a society, about our beliefs and the practices that follow from them.  We should be aware that theory shaping practices is itself shaped by practices.  Once a society, for whatever reasons, begins to practice assisted suicide, its very practice will shape the culture and its accepted reasoning.  Once ‘the pill’ was invented to prevent conception, society quickly changed its views—and therefore its practices—about out-of-wedlock sex.  What will a society practicing assisted suicide begin to think about life, suffering, compassion, care, responsibility, and so forth?

A Christian understanding of suffering is different from other views.  Consider what Paul wrote after facing a near death experience, perhaps from a threatening crowd in Asia.  He identifies eight aspects of comfort for a Christian perspective on suffering:

1.     God’s comfort of the sufferer,

2.     comfort from the Christian community,

3.     suffering persons sharing in Christ’s sufferings and comfort,

4.     suffering for the sake of others (for their salvation),

5.     individuals in the Christian community sharing in each other’s sufferings and comfort,

6.     suffering that leads to a greater reliance on God,

7.     hope that God will deliver one from suffering, and

8.     helping others in their suffering through the power of prayer for one another. 

To quote:

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, 4 who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. 5 For as we share abundantly in Christ’s sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too.  6 If we are afflicted, it is for your comfort and salvation; and if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which you experience when you patiently endure the same sufferings that we suffer. 7 Our hope for you is unshaken, for we know that as you share in our sufferings, you will also share in our comfort.

8 For we do not want you to be unaware, brothers, of the affliction we experienced in Asia. For we were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself. 9 Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death. But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead. 10 He delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us. On him we have set our hope that he will deliver us again. 11 You also must help us by prayer, so that many will give thanks on our behalf for the blessing granted us through the prayers of many.

The Christian community and faith lead to a very different understanding of suffering and compassion from what others will say about it.  Compassion means different things to different people based on their prior commitments to a certain worldview.  This brings us back to our question: What sort of a community are we?  Or, What sort of a community do we wish to be?  The Christian view of suffering is one that can understand it theologically, communally, and in regard to the dynamics of lived faith.  This powerful trajectory of thought contradicts arguments for assisted suicide and government assisted suicide especially.  The Christian witness to society at large presses the question: What sort of society do we wish to be?