Legal Medically Assisted Suicide is a Terrible Idea

I found this information horrifying: Almost 5% (technically, 4.7%) of deaths in Canada are from legal medically assisted suicide. 15,343 medically assisted suicide deaths out of 326,571 total deaths.

If practiced in the United States of America (3,279,857 deaths in 2022), that would be a little over 154,000 “medically assisted suicide” deaths in a year. That would be more than three times the number of people who die in car crashes. And more than three times the number of people who die from gun-inflicted injuries (many of which are already suicides).

Apparently you can “qualify” for “medically assisted suicide” in Canada even if your illness is not terminal, or even if you’re not physically sick. (We’re all “terminal” in some sense, as eventually we’re all going to die, at least from an earthly perspective.) And apparently the number of medically assisted suicides has exploded since the activity was legally formalized in 2016.

During the Covid year of 2020, I developed an enhanced understanding of why some people want to commit suicide. Government officials, social institutions, and others kept telling me that my very existence was a threat to others, and that nothing I might do outweighed the probability that my presence would hurt someone else. So of course I began to think that the world would be better off without me. I never did anything with those thoughts, as my longstanding Christian faith told me somehow I was still worth something, and that my life here on Earth still had value. But I got a more thorough understanding of why some people commit suicide. And how easy, if government and social institutions support and encourage suicide, it can be for people to decide their lives are not worth living, and that the world would be better without them.

Amid rumors that “medically assisted suicide” is a part of the program of the Canadian government to control the costs of government-provided medical care, it is easy to see pressure to further increase “medically assisted suicides” in the future.

I am horrified that such a statistically significant number of deaths is directly attributable to legally sanctioned suicide. The United States should not follow that path. We should not be encouraging (or even tacitly approving) people to think so little of their lives that they conclude that the best course of action is killing themselves.