This magazine cover has repeatedly greeted me in the specialty grocery store checkout line this past month. Your RIGHT to die. Rights are good, right? Mo’ rights, mo’ betta, right? This is a difficult topic to discuss. I think for now the only thing I have to say in reply to the push for normalizing assisted suicide is to repost this quote from the late Rene Girard:
The experience of death is going to get more and more painful, contrary to what many people believe. The forthcoming euthanasia will make it more rather than less painful because it will put the emphasis on personal decision in a way which was blissfully alien to the whole problem of dying in former times. It will make death even more subjectively intolerable, for people will feel responsible for their own deaths and morally obligated to rid their relatives of their unwanted presence. Euthanasia will further intensify all the problems its advocates think it will solve.
(Emphasis mine. I’m afraid I don’t recall the origin of this, though it may have been referenced in something Gil Bailie wrote.)