One sunny day in June, I opened up my university email, which I only do occasionally now that I am retired, to see an email marked “confidential” in my inbox. In it, the deputy vice-chancellor at my former employer, the University of Sunderland, informed me of an external complaint concerning my recent public social media activity. When I eventually managed to see the much-redacted complaint, it found fault with the “tone and nature” of my online engagement on the topic of assisted suicide. I was accused of “Public Misrepresentation and Lack of Empathy.” The letter writer also objected to my use of the word “Orwellian,” which I had used to characterize campaigners’ refusal to call “suicide” the act of deliberately ingesting poison with the intent to die, even as they advocate a change to the Suicide Act 1961. I had also said their object was “to make killing acceptable in law.”
This spurious complaint gives insight into how political aims are furthered by capturing and policing our language. Assisted suicide is a case in point of a much broader trend. Rather than engage in difficult discussions, campaigners change the terms of the debate, ostensibly to avoid offending others. So campaigners in favor of assisted suicide redefine words like “suicide” or “killing.” When questioned, they declare that using the proscribed terms is offensive.
The campaign to legalize assisted suicide has sought to inject new terminology into the discussion. Its propaganda is peppered with phrases which, upon examination, fade into meaninglessness. The most egregious is the use of the phrase “assisted dying” to obscure the reality that euthanasia and assisted suicide involve either homicide or suicide. Phrases like “dying people” and “choice at the end of life” do similar work. One of the justifications for distinguishing between “assisted suicide” and “assisted dying” is that when terminally ill people kill themselves, they are choosing between two ways of dying rather than, as with suicide, simply choosing to end their life. The organization Dignity in Dying points to the “clear difference between helping someone to die who is terminally ill and helping someone to die who is not.”
None of this stands up to scrutiny. If someone hangs himself after being given the news that his cancer is inoperable and likely to kill him in the coming weeks, is that suicide? If it is not, how can we say that someone who is terminally ill but with a longer prognosis who jumps in front of a train is a suicide? Is the definition of suicide dependent on the method of killing oneself? If ropes and guns are suicides and pills are not suicide, is such a distinction useful for homicide cases too? Does murdering someone with poison amount to a “dignified and peaceful” death?
The clear purpose of this rebranding is to remove the moral stigma from the act of ending a life, and thereby to make killing more palatable. It began with a movement to remove the phrase “commit suicide.” As an article in the Australian Psychological Society website states bluntly: “Suicide is not a sin and is no longer a crime, so we should stop saying that people ‘commit’ suicide.” But if suicide is no longer a sin or morally wrong, why would we prevent it? The therapeutic reasoning behind this move prompted many to adopt more sensitive language, forgetting, perhaps, that maintaining the idea that suicide is a bad act at least gives some reason to prevent it.
The US-based organization Death With Dignity noted these changes, adopting the rebranding as a way to make assisted suicide more palatable. They note on their website that the change occurred in the 1990s when “advocates were facing an uphill battle for support.” Eli Stutsman, lawyer and main author of the Death with Dignity Act in Oregon, which passed in 1994, said: “At the time, the issue very badly needed to be rebranded and repositioned. And that’s what we did.”Barbara Coombs Lee, an author of Oregon’s model law and president at the time of another pro-assisted suicide group, Compassion & Choices, remembers a meeting in 2004 where her group discussed which terminology to use going forward. The impetus “was probably another frustrated conversation about another interminable interview with a reporter who insisted on calling it suicide,” she said. A phrase like “medical aid in dying,” Compassion & Choices concluded, would reassure patients that they were taking part in a process that was regulated and medically sanctioned.
Those who favor legalizing assisted dying are offended by the use of the word suicide. As one supporter, the anthropologist Anita Hannig, puts it in her book The Day I Die, “many still find it hard to shake the stigma and sense of transgression that cling to the idea of ending one’s own life. … Calling an assisted death a ‘suicide’ has been harmful to patients and families.” Cat Eccles, when her fellow MP Danny Kruger used the term “suicide,” interrupted him: “The honorable gentleman is using incorrect language. It is not suicide. That is offensive. I ask him please to correct his language.” The term “suicide” when referring to “death with dignity,” is “offensive and inaccurate,” declares Death With Dignity.
“Many admit that their purpose in twisting language is political.”
Many admit that their purpose in twisting language is political. The philosopher Gerald Dworkin, an advocate of legalization, stated that “the use of the term ‘physician-assisted suicide’ is now politically incorrect, for tactical reasons. I understand that the popular prejudice against suicide makes it more difficult to rally support for the bills I favor.”
One of the ways that pro-assisted suicide organizations manipulate our language is by “capturing” ostensibly neutral bodies and forcing them to accept the new vocabulary. The American Association of Suicidology board passed a statement in August 2017 titled “Suicide” is not the same as “Physician aid in dying.” In August 2023, the organization “retired” the statement, but was later successfully lobbied to reinstate it. As the website for Dying with Dignity puts it, the change occurred after “months of relationship-building, education, and thoughtful engagement with AAS leadership.”
In Britain, campaigners against legislative change have insisted on the term assisted suicide. In recent debates in parliament, many simply refused to bow down to the language police. On September 11th, in the debate concerning Lauren Edwards’ terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, MPs Shivani Raja, Rosie Duffield, Jim Shannon, Ashley Dalton and many other lawmakers referred exclusively to assisted suicide, refusing to be cowed. As Carla Lock, Democratic Unionist MP for Upper Bann, said: “Yesterday was World Suicide Prevention Day; the irony should not be lost on any Member of this House.” Ben Spencer, a member of parliament and former psychiatrist who opposed the bill, noted that the bill “frames the debate—the intervention—as shortening the death process or some form of assisted dying rather than what it is, which is physician-assisted suicide.”
That the bill was defeated indicates that we have been successful in pushing back against those who would police our language. When we wrest back control of our terms, it removes one of their most powerful weapons in their fight to make a form of suicide palatable. It is not surprising that frustrated campaigners are complaining about language used by me and others concerned about the implications of legalized assisted suicide.