The Euthanasia Crowd Keeps Playing With Words

Euthanasia activists are obsessed with lexicon. They believe that if only they can find the right words to use in identifying mercy killing and assisted suicide, people will see the wisdom of their proposal and embrace medicalized homicide.

This obsession with words and terms has marked the euthanasia movement from the very beginning. Indeed, euthanasia, the current word for mercy killing, once meant a pain free natural death, experienced in a state of grace, and ideally, surrounded by family—akin to the modern concept of hospice. But as Professor Ian Dowbiggin noted in his splendid book, A Concise History of Euthanasia, the word was co-opted in one of the first modern essays supporting mercy killing, authored in 1870 by a school teacher named Samuel D. Williams. From Dowbiggin’s account:

In advocating voluntary active euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide, Williams was instrumental in redefining euthanasia as an act of mercy killing rather than a passive process in which the discomforts of death are mitigated but not intentionally ended by pain killers.

Euthanasia advocates have been at it ever since, as Rita Marker and I describe in “Words, Words, Words,” published in the Duquesne Law Review several years ago .

The current gooey euphemisms of choice for the euthanasia crowd are “death with dignity” and “physician assisted death.” But the great word project continues, with new advocacy for yet another term that proponents are convinced will persuade people of the goodness of euthanasia. Thus, in this essay, one James Park proposes “gentle death” as the advocacy phrase that will turn the tide, writing:

The opposition will complain that we have just given a new name to an old evil, but the people in the middle will think twice before they easily and automatically turn against gentle death.

This would be pathetic if not for the seriousness of the controversy. In any event, this much is sure: Assisted suicide and euthanasia advocates don’t want people to focus on the precise act they seek to legalize and legitimize, and hence, they will continue to search for their Holy Grail, the right phrase or words that will convince people to drink the hemlock. Indeed, as Dowbiggin notes, they have been at this task for more than 100 years.