Last week, the U.K. came a step closer to legalizing assisted suicide. Except that proponents were careful never to use the word “suicide,” despite the bill’s very clear amendment of the 1961 Suicide Act. In the debate that preceded the vote, advocates preferred euphemisms such as “the right to die” and “dignified death.” A government that couldn’t wait to lock down longer and harder just a few years ago suddenly extolled the sacred principles of “autonomy” and “choice.”
Hidden behind the euphemisms is a desire to sanitize and destigmatize the profound act of taking one’s life. Linguistic sleights of hand hide what is really going on: In legalizing what was once called “euthanasia,” we are not expanding freedom but normalizing the suicide of the vulnerable as a good and laudable choice. The idea that it can ever be “good” for a human being to commit suicide brings us to the final stage in society’s devaluation of human life.
The stigma against suicide is being removed, and in an insidious manner. Suicide is being transformed into a sanitized and bureaucratic process, overseen and sanctioned by government. Outside of this bureaucratic context, suicide, and death more generally, remain stigmatized. This is how it should be. Anthropologists have long described cultural taboos surrounding death. The taboos exist because death is a momentous event, with great potential for chaos and disruption. The stigma around death reflects the gravity of social rupture and prevents death’s reduction to the mundane. In this way, as Roger Scruton once argued,
Stigma is not an act of aggression but a sign that we care about our neighbors’ lives and actions. It expresses the consciousness of other people, the desire for their good opinion, and the impetus to uphold the social norms that make judgment possible.
The stigma against suicide, in particular, acts as a safeguard, affirming the value of our bonds with each other, and preventing suicide from being normalized or trivialized.
Destigmatization is not a neutral act. The removal of a stigma makes a thing not merely permissible, but normal. And in contemporary society, what is normal is good. In The Taming of Chance, his 1990 history of probability, Ian Hacking explains how the concept of normality has taken on a prescriptive edge. As social statistics rendered social life more predictable and governable, what had once been a statistical agglomeration of differences became a statement about how people “should” be. In other words, to normalize came to mean “to make it good.”
With respect to euthanasia, the consequences are profound. Proponents begin by claiming that euthanasia will remain an extreme measure and will rarely be undertaken. Yet in every country that has legalized euthanasia, advocacy groups have not disbanded but kept at work and built on their success. Canada continually has extended its euthanasia program to less and less grievous conditions, and was set to offer euthanasia to the mentally ill until public outcry slowed the process. In the Netherlands, proposals are on the table for an expansion of euthanasia to anyone over age seventy-five. A woman who lost two family members and a friend to euthanasia in Belgium told me in exasperation: “You know, it’s really becoming the preferred way to die.”
The truth of this observation is illustrated by Luxembourg, where the uptake of euthanasia remains relatively low. Given the initial promise of euthanasia advocates—that the resort to euthanasia would remain rare—Luxembourg would seem to be a success story. Yet advocates there complain that low rates of euthanasia bespeak a “reluctance to discuss death” that prevents people from exploring their “options.” The implication is clear: Natural deaths, deaths that are messy, unpredictable, and unregulated, are less “dignified” and desirable.
Behind this embrace of death is a culture-wide pessimism about human life. We have become so accustomed to thinking of human beings as climate catastrophes, as contaminating “footprints” on a despoiled earth, that it is easy to justify policies that treat humans as expendable. Formerly fringe, Malthusian ideas about too many and too costly lives have entered the mainstream, where public figures unabashedly explain that some lives simply can’t be afforded. British commentator Matthew Parris advocates in The Times to end the “taboo” on assisted dying, arguing that there are simply too many old and unwell people. It is their social duty to ask themselves, “How much is all this costing relatives and the health service?” Meanwhile, a Belgian insurance executive candidly argues for the expansion of Belgium’s euthanasia laws in order to “prevent a crisis in social care.” An increasing number of Canadians have no qualms about offering MAID to those whose only “affliction” is poverty.
This taken-for-granted antihumanism helps explain why assisted dying is increasingly not just permitted but celebrated. Assisted deaths sometimes happen amid a party atmosphere, even a literal “death party” for the soon-to-be-dispatched. One attendee described RSVPing to such a party as if it were a Sunday brunch. Suicide, once rightly stigmatized as a social rupture and a tragedy, is being reframed as an ethical, even commendable, choice.
We are witnessing not just a shift in policy but a shift in values. The stigma around suicide served an important function. It reminded us of the value of being human—not just our biological lives, but the unique capacities that make us human: our ability to use language, to conceive of justice, to imagine progress. Only human beings do these things. Stigma can be cruel, but it can also remind us that every life, no matter how difficult, however short the time left, holds potential and meaning. The destigmatization of assisted dying reflects a retreat from this belief. It signals a loss of hope in humanity’s capacity to overcome challenges or envision a better future.
The expansion of euthanasia represents a fundamental shift in how society understands its obligations to individuals. Instead of addressing the causes of suffering—poverty, inadequate healthcare, social isolation—euthanasia offers an efficient solution. But efficiency is not the same as compassion. A society that chooses death over life reveals not its strength but its despair. The answer is not to destigmatize suicide but to preserve the moral frameworks that affirm life. What deserves to be stigmatized is the anti-human ideology that masquerades as progress.
Ashley Frawley is a sociologist and senior editor of Compact.
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