The Glorification of Suicide
A Canadian company runs an ad celebrating the country’s medical assisted suicide law.
Death is the last great enemy. It is inevitable and unavoidable. However, death is not the end of existence. The religious have long known this fact. And Christianity offers the one true answer to the riddle for entering heaven upon death. The fear of death has driven all kinds of endeavors throughout history across all cultures. Life is beautiful, life is a gift, life is special, and yet all too often the living take it for granted.
When it comes to the issue of abortion, those promoting this deadly practice attempt to ignore the fact that human life is being willfully snuffed out and all for the sake of convenience of an older life. Activists and Leftmedia outlets alike deny that a preborn human baby is a life, calling infants killed in abortions “pregnancy tissue” or some other euphemism.
This secular death cult on the one hand seeks to deny that human life exits prior to birth, and then celebrates death in the form of euthanasia. In both instances, the death cult rejects the sanctity of human life.
The latest example of the promotion of this death cult comes from north of the border. A Quebec retailer recently released a commercial that effectively promotes the nation’s assisted suicide law. The ad features Jennyfer Hatch, who earlier this year used Canada’s “medical assistance in dying” law or MAID to end her life. Hatch, who suffered from Ehlers Danlos syndrome, is depicted throughout the ad claiming that MAID allowed her to live the last days of her life to the fullest. In other words, MAID is depicted as a mercy, not a threat to life. It seeks to dignify suicide.
The trouble is that government-sanction assisted suicide is just one small step away from government-implemented euthanasia. Indeed, one Canadian who suffers from cerebellar ataxia, a disease that “attacks the brains and muscles” and has left him bedridden for the last six years, is suing a local hospital for pressuring him to commit suicide.
Despite his challenging condition, Roger Foley very much wants to live, and he argues that MAID is being used to pressure chronically ill patients to end their lives and save the medical institution the cost and trouble of having to provide long-term care. It’s sadly ironic that a hospital that exists to preserve life is instead eschewing that high calling and embracing the ideology of the secular cult of death.
Foley rightly worries that MAID will be used by the government to justify euthanizing patients who are deemed burdens to society. This is yet another argument against the adoption of a single-payer government healthcare system in the U.S., where bureaucrats rather than doctors will be making one-size-fits-all healthcare decisions for the masses. They’ll be doing so based more on numbers and figures than the patient.
Finally, the biggest consideration that the secularists entirely and foolishly reject is the reality of the afterlife. Eternity awaits us all on the other side. As Scripture teaches, there but two places an individual will spend eternity; Heaven or Hell.
No matter how bad life gets on this side of the grave, it is nowhere near as final nor as terrible as eternity in Hell. And this is the great tragedy of Hatch’s decision to end her life — it does not appear that she knew Jesus. As Christ clearly stated, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” (John 14:6)