The media is encouraging suicide of the sick.

The following article was written by Wesley Smith and published on his Human Exceptionalism blog on November 27.

Wesley Smith

By Wesley Smith

The media sells content these days by promoting the supposed virtues of suicide by the sick and disabled. How else explain the National Post doing an extended, puff interview with two ill women about their plans to commit suicide? From the article:

Q: How important is it for you to have that measure of control over when to end your life? 

MYERS: I think that’s paramount. In an ideal world I’d be able to make the choice and have my loved ones and family and friends and whoever I wanted to be with me through that journey. As it stands right now, I don’t have that choice. This is a choice I will have to do on my own and I’m going to have to make sure that nobody’s around when I do it. I value life enough to know that I don’t want to put anybody else in legal jeopardy because I might want to say “enough is enough.”… 

RIGGS: I think that’s incredibly important. I think that one of the most important parts of this whole issue is that, as patients, we are in control.

These kind of pro suicide articles push a destructively discriminatory meme that if one is seriously ill and/or dependent, they should really consider suicide. Not only that, but so promoting suicide violates the media guidelines on reporting the issue published by the World Health Association:

Media play a significant role in today’s society by providing a very wide range of information in a variety of ways. They strongly influence community attitudes, beliefs and behaviour, and play a vital role in politics, economics and social practice. Because of that influence media can also play an active role in the prevention of suicide…One of the many factors that may lead a vulnerable individual to suicide could be publicity about suicides in the media. How the media report on suicide cases can influence other suicides.

But Wesley, one of the women has ALS! Surely that justifies suicide! No, it justifies doing all we can so that the ALS patient doesn’t want suicide.

I’ve seen ALS close up and personal. My good friend and last hospice patient, Robert Salamanca, died from it. He had been suicidal too–for almost two years. He told me that he had wanted to go to Kevorkian, for gosh sakes!

But then, in his words, “I came out of the fog and was so glad to be alive.”  He came to bitterly resent advocacy for suicide by hoisting patients with ALS up the flag pole as assisted suicide’s battle flag–as in NP’s piece–taking to the pages of the San Francisco Chronicle to make his point. From, “I Don’t Want a Choice to Die:”

Many pro-euthanasia groups “showcase” people with ALS. They portray us as feeble, unintelligible and dying by slow suffocation. This is absolutely false, and I protest their efforts vehemently. By receiving proper medical care, a terminally ill person can pass away peacefully, pain-free and with dignity. We are not people just waiting for someone to help us end our misery, but to the contrary, we are people reaching out to love . . . to be loved . . . wanting to feel life at its best.

As with most ALS patients who receive proper care–Bob passed away peacefully in his sleep. But he lived ”intensely,”–his descriptive–until that very moment; loving his family, collecting art, making money from on-line investing, writing a memoir.

Bob concluded his Chronicle piece:

I exhort everyone: Life is worth living, and life is worth receiving. I know. I live it every day.

We don’t see opinions like Bob’s presented in the media much anymore. Rather, media propagandistically amplifies the siren song of suicide. Ditto popular entertainment and pro assisted suicide advocacy campaigns.

Many will just shrug that Bob didn’t actually commit suicide, so what is the problem? Here is the problem: Because of the suicide pushers, the Bob’s of the future might not live long enough to “come out of the fog” and get on with life.