Twenty years ago, Terri Schiavo, a severely disabled woman reliant on hospital care and a feeding tube, died when her husband made the decision to deny her nutrition and hydration.
Schiavo’s natal family did everything they could to prevent her from being starved to death in her hospital bed. President George W. Bush, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and countless others across the country advocated on her behalf and sought various remedies.
However, her husband, although he was cohabiting with another woman by whom he had fathered two children, was afforded the legal right to decide her fate. This was a key moment in the advancement of what the late Pope John Paul II described as “the culture of death.”
There was, of course, talk of “what Terri would have wanted,” but Schiavo died because her husband regarded her life as not worth living. And the culture of death has marched on from there.
For many years now, campaigns to legalize assisted suicide and euthanasia — usually marketed under euphemistic labels like “medical aid in dying” — have carried the day in Canada, Australia and several Western European nations. The United Kingdom is on track to become the most recent addition to this ignominious bloc, with its House of Commons voting in June to legalize assisted suicide for terminally ill persons whose doctors attest that they have less than six months to live.
Experience has shown, however, that strictures purporting to limit assisted suicide and euthanasia to those who are terminally ill and likely to die soon quickly give way to liberalized rules that extend access to essentially anyone who says he or she wants to die. In one widely publicized tragedy last year, a physically healthy 29-year-old Dutch woman was approved for and received a lethal injection to end her “unbearable” mental suffering.
Claims that assisted suicide and euthanasia regimes would be limited in scope, and impact only a narrow slice of the population, have similarly proven to be false. In Canada, nearly 5% of all deaths are now the result of assisted suicide; in one province, Quebec, the rate is on track to eclipse 20%.
Here in the U.S., the assisted suicide movement achieved several victories in the 1990s and early 2000s, but it lost steam as the public’s focus shifted to other progressive culture-war causes, most prominently same-sex marriage. Now, though, campaigns to legalize assisted suicide in America are back in full force.
Early victories for assisted suicide in Western states have spread to the Atlantic seaboard. New Jersey, my own adopted state, has seen significant annual increases in assisted suicides after legalization in 2019. Assisted suicide is on the verge of becoming legal in New York — a bill passed by the state legislature is currently sitting on Gov. Kathy Hochul’s desk as she considers whether to sign it into law.
Our troubled culture long ago, beginning with the acceptance of elective abortion, profoundly compromised its sanctity of life ethic. But the expansion of assisted suicide and euthanasia marks a new frontier in the culture of death. And this time — in contrast to the national mobilization that arose, for example, in the aftermath of Roe v. Wade — proponents of killing our society’s most vulnerable are finding success with comparably little public attention and coordinated resistance.
Behind the veneer of “freedom of choice,” there is an ideology that distinguishes those “worthy of life” from those whose lives allegedly “aren’t worth living.” Whether it is communicated explicitly or only hinted at, the elderly and suffering are being encouraged to think of themselves as burdens — on society, on caregivers, on their families. The suggestion, sometimes subtle and sometimes anything but subtle, is that voluntarily accepting a lethal injection or poisonous cocktail constitutes a “dignified” way to end a life.
Appeals to “liberty” and “personal autonomy” are often accompanied by slick semantic tricks like “It isn’t about ending a person’s life, but shortening their death.” But it’s important for all of us to stay steadily focused on the many well-founded objections, grounded in moral and ethical concerns as well as medical realities, coming from both traditional conservatives and many on the left.
Those of us who believe in the inherent and inviolable dignity of each and every human life — who believe that there is no such thing as a “life not worth living” and that intentional killing is always a grave moral evil — must resist, and seek to reverse, the assisted suicide revolution. Let us make no mistake: What has happened in Canada and some other Western nations will soon happen here. In some states, it’s already happening.
We must be prepared to push back hard with every legislative, political and cultural means available to us — from vigorously opposing bills and voting out politicians, to making sound arguments in the public square in defense of the sanctity of human life in all stages and conditions.
Robert P. George is the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. His new book is “Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth" (Encounter Books).