How the MAiD Movement Signals the Decline of Western Culture

This article was published by Kelsi Sheren on her Substack on July 21, 2025.

Kelsi Sheren

By Kelsi Sherin

YES another article on MAiD, but this time this one felt weird. Have you heard of Be Ceremonial? Specifically their programs about MAiD. It hit me hard, hard enough to stop what I was doing and write this. This one made me genuinely upset and angry. Once again seeing someone exploit death and promote MAiD. Seeing death celebrated alongside big life events like the birth of a child and marriages felt fundamentally wrong. It made me think about how far we've fallen as a society in the west and how we now celebrate choosing death as though it were something noble or courageous to strive for.

In case your unaware or if I haven’t made it clear before. I don’t support MAiD or the people who push it on our society like they’re saving people. They kill people and promote it in book’s and on social media. Compassionate care and dignity are what everyone deserves at the end of their life, but actively encouraging or celebrating medically assisted suicide crosses a moral and ethical line for me. They’ve been promoting death as something ritualistic and ceremonial like a wedding or a birth and this dangerously normalizes the act of ending a life. This is a Dr or nurse killing someone before they were supposed to leave this earth. That’s not care and compassion, that’s removing hope and prematurely hastening death.

One of my many issues with MAiD is the message this sends to the population, a seriously harmful message that surrendering, giving up, or ending your life early is somehow admirable or even desirable, it’s the cool new popular thing to do. It feel’s to me like society is losing sight of life's inherent value and what it truly means to be alive. Life was never promised without suffering, and anyone who's lived knows that pain isn't optional. Suffering isn't something you choose, but it's proof you're still breathing, still fighting, and still here.

Pain, struggle, loss these things carve us out, forging stronger, more resilient versions of ourselves. If you're suffering, you're feeling something real. You're awake to your life, connected deeply to your humanity, living in the gritty, messy truth of existence. That's the price we pay to experience all of life and it’s true purpose. Suffering reminds you you're human and if you're human, you're alive, ready to keep moving forward until the natural end. It's beyond irresponsible and deeply harmful for our media, “charities” and others to package a tragic, irreversible choice as just another marketable life event, glamorizing something that steals away our most precious gift: life itself.

I personally understand and respect the power of ritual. Ritual has helped me significantly in processing trauma and healing from my time overseas. I've used plant medicine and psychedelic-assisted therapy to overcome trauma. While rituals can be profoundly healing, when we start associating them with the deliberate act of ending someone’s life prematurely, we dangerously blur the line between healing and harm. I would even go as far to say that this act of killing causes more trauma than people are willing to admit. I’ve seen this personally with a significant amount of families and their loved ones. MAiD breaks families and anyone it touches. MAiD is sold to individuals as the solution “It’s ok if your family doesn’t understand, we do and we can be your family now if yours doesn’t approve” We need to stop pretending MAiD doesn’t leave crater size damage. MAiD leaves behind the feeling's of “I couldn’t save them, I couldn’t stop them”. That level of helplessness is excruciating to live with.

Watching someone die, especially through a process like MAiD, is far more traumatic and distressing than most people realize. If you need a quick reminder, MAiD is still killing no matter what fancy acronym they slap on it, it's still death. Here's a widespread myth that medically assisted dying is always peaceful, gentle, or dignified, but this is often far from reality. Many documented cases show how MAiD procedures have gone terribly wrong, and when I say wrong I mean bad. People have awakened mid-death, needing to be re-drugged. Cases of people in the US asking the Dr mid death to stop and him continuing.

Documented cases taking oral assisted suicide drugs have the longest time of death at 137 hours in 2023 and 26 hours in 2024 in Oregon.

The medications used can paralyze a person, causing their lungs to fill with fluid, essentially drowning them within their own bodies. Imagine the horror of being unable to scream or beg for help if you suddenly change your mind.

Societies thrive when they value resilience, courage, and the collective ability to overcome challenges, when did this mentality of “quit, stop trying and die” start. Life is often painful and complicated, but the struggle itself is meaningful. Encouraging or normalizing death as something to celebrate undermines our most fundamental human instinct to survive, persevere, and find hope by doing the truly hard things. I would argue it already has created a culture of indifferent or numb to suicide and euthanasia, handling profound loss casually rather than with the seriousness and sensitivity it deserves.

To me, celebrating death signals deep cultural sickness. It shows that our society is losing respect for the real dignity and value inherent in every single life. Framing death as a celebratory milestone that we should all want is not progressive or enlightened, it’s so obviously misguided. This to me feel’s more like a DEI type project where we are being told that everyone should have death and no one should be turned down.

It signals that we are becoming a culture defined more by resignation than resilience, which is not progress; it's a huge decline and signals failures in the government and healthcare system of epic proportions.

Previous articles by Kelsi Sheren (Link).