(LifeSiteNews) — Suffering comes in innumerable forms. In our increasingly atomized society, we have fewer and fewer support systems and safety nets to alleviate our suffering. And so assisted suicide regimes have become the final – and predictable – consequence of radical personal autonomy. We are alone and we can do whatever we want – but because we are alone, many of us want to die.
Assisted suicide is becoming the default for our postmodern society’s many failures. If you attempt to change your sex – as the culture tells you that you can – and the surgery fails and the drugs don’t work, you can always opt for state-sanctioned suicide. If you are hopelessly lonely, you can ask to be euthanized. If you cannot break your addictions and are tired of trying, you can ask to be euthanized. Every one of those examples has happened in Western countries – and recently.
And so, it is not surprising that we are seeing the term “suffering” used as a catch-all category. A recent column in BioEdge noted several recent examples, including the death of 56-year-old Genevieve Lhermitte, who was killed by assisted suicide sixteen years to the day after she murdered her five children aged 15, 12, 10, 7, and 3 by stabbing them or slitting their throats – allegedly to traumatize her husband.
Sentenced to life in prison, she was released in 2019 into a psychiatric hospital. She asked for and was granted permission to commit assisted suicide for psychological suffering on February 28.
There are others. Nathalie Huygens, a 50-year-old Belgian who was the victim of a violent rape in 2016, applied for and was approved for assisted suicide due to the tremendous psychological suffering she endured afterwards. “I fought all this time day after day to keep myself alive, it is not tenable,” she told the press.
“I want the suffering to stop, to end. Knowing now that I can die is somehow reassuring.” As I noted in my 2016 book “The Culture War,” a 44-year-old suffering from anorexia also died by assisted suicide in 2014 after being sexually abused by her psychiatrist.
BioEdge also cited the example of Shanti De Corte, who was 17 when she survived the 2016 terrorist bombing in Brussels and suffered from PTSD and suicidal ideation as a result. She made her second suicide attempt after being sexually assaulted in a psychiatric hospital.
“That day really cracked her,” her mother told a Belgian TV station. “She never felt safe after that.” De Corte was killed by assisted suicide in 2021, and the Federal Commission for the Control and Evaluation of Euthanasia of Belgium found nothing concerning about her death.
This is what we are seeing unfold almost weekly in Canada. Last week, Les Landry of Medicine Hat, Alberta, came on our podcast and explained why he is applying for assisted suicide – not because he wants to die, he emphasized, but because he cannot afford to live.
He also noted that the Trudeau government has taken years to deal with the deadly shortage of disability assistance in Canada – but managed to ramrod an assisted suicide regime through in record time. The government, in short, recognizes that there is much suffering, and also recognizes that they either cannot or will not offer the support necessary to alleviate that suffering.
Instead, the government offers “death with dignity,” which simply means dying sooner.
Suffering from mental illness? We offer you suicide. Struggling to live with a disability and in need of desperate support? We offer you suicide. Suffering horribly after a traumatizing victimization? Suicide. Lonely? Suicide. Sick? Suicide. Suicidal? Suicide.
This slippery slope with a pile of corpses at the bottom and a lineup at the top – and a government spokesperson telling the crowd to step right this way to access your state-given right to die with dignity. Your suffering can be ended – not by the assistance you so badly need, but at the end of a needle.
