The year I spent in bed, I often thought about dying. I was sick with Epstein-Barr virus and, subsequently, myalgic encephalomyelitis, a poorly understood neurological illness that sometimes follows viral infections and causes everything from intense nausea to debilitating headaches to difficulty speaking. Doctors had no real treatments to offer. No one could say if I would ever get better. I thought that I might die, or that at some point I would want to. Even as my health slowly improved, I was often in pain and struggled with basic daily tasks.
Before I got sick, as a dyed-in-the-wool Anglo-Catholic who believed life is an infinitely precious gift from God, I was convinced that physician-assisted suicide was immoral. Spending so much time seriously ill, in pain, thinking about death every day, and learning from chronically ill and disability communities only deepened my convictions. I’m not only opposed to PAS, I’m also convinced that our highly individualistic way of framing the issue is wrong altogether.
Both advocates and opponents of PAS tend to frame the debate as a question of agency or individual choice, the same way we think of abortion. But PAS is far more like other forms of suicide than we care to admit. With suicide in other contexts—say, the several thousand American teenagers who die by suicide each year—we recognize that a person’s choice is influenced by social factors. Maybe a teen faced cruel, relentless bullying; maybe they were unable to get the mental health help they needed due to cost or stigma; maybe they were let down by their parents, mentors, and teachers. Survey data shows that LGBTQ teens who have an accepting adult in their life are 40 percent less likely to attempt suicide.
