Dying With Indignity

A crisis of meaning has more people opting for physician-assisted suicide in the West.

A woman with deep blue eyes and wavy brown hair sits in front of a camera.

“Hello, my name is Zoraya and I’m 28 years old,” she says with a slight smile. “I live in the Netherlands and recently my euthanasia request for my mental suffering got approved.”

The smile is gone, replaced with pursed lips.

There’s nothing physically wrong with Zoraya ter Beek. But in May, she will receive a drug to stop her heart, having elected to end her life by euthanasia rather than live with depression, autism, and borderline personality disorder. She’ll leave behind two cats and a boyfriend, along with their home in the Netherlands, which became the first country to legalize medical suicide in 2001. The Netherlands saw 8,720 euthanasia deaths in 2022, representing about 5 percent of all the country’s deaths.

Ter Beek recalled to The Free Press that her psychiatrist told her that “there’s nothing more we can do for you. It’s never gonna get any better.” So that was that. Ter Beek made plans to be cremated, though she confessed a twinge of fear at the prospect of oblivion.

Suicide isn’t new. But the frivolity accompanying it in our time and the crisis of meaning fueling it seems like a deviation. There’s also a remarkable lack of concern for the corruption and predatory practices that could arise.

What stops the companies that make the sedatives and drugs and devices used in “medically-assisted dying” from creating incentives for physicians to readily recommend euthanasia? Nobody’s asking that question, but they should.

A recent study published in The Journal of the American Medical Association found that the pharmaceutical and medical device industry paid physicians over $12 billion in the last decade. “Despite evidence that financial conflicts of interest may influence physician prescribing and may damage patients’ trust in medical professionals, such relationships remain pervasive,” the authors noted.

No kidding.