August 7, 2025

By Jamie Towey

Readers of our newsletter and consumers of our social media have increasingly been reaching out in response to our obviously more vocal stance on physician-assisted suicide (PAS) and euthanasia. I think it’s fair to ask why we’re getting involved in this contentious political topic. Why do we care so much about what someone chooses to do at the end of life?

Let’s look at the approach we take to prevent forest fires (as a father of three boys, I’m reading my fair share of firefighting books, so please bear with me). When the winds are calm and rain is plentiful, out trots Smokey Bear to teach us about forest fire prevention. But when the hills are ablaze, Smokey gets shoved in a closet and every firefighter in the vicinity kicks into overdrive to contain and extinguish the fire.

Well, for over 25 years, AWD was doing fire prevention. Our Five Wishes advance care planning tool has reached over 43 million American families. That is a staggering number to ponder; I am grateful to be part of an organization that has helped so many Americans find peace at the end of life. But those with concerns about PAS  were late to  stamp out the sparks in Oregon and later Washington where this practice first began to spread in America. When the pretty, soft-spoken, and dogged Brittany Maynard ignited a national discourse on PAS in 2015, a narrative of compassion around this practice began to form which still prevails in some quarters. Just a decade later, PAS is legal in 12 jurisdictions, with the Empire State poised to be conquered once Governor Kathy Hochul signs the bill sitting on her desk.

What started out as a spark has become a five-alarm fire.

Euthanasia is wrong because it kills a patient. PAS is wrong because patients kill themselves. Both involve a physician who must violate their professional pledge to “do no harm.” There’s a litany of arguments for why these are, indeed, wrong and why the act of killing is fundamentally different from merely allowing someone to die (you can find some of these arguments on our Assisted Suicide Watch website, including our newest research paper). But that doesn’t answer why we care. After all, supporters of PAS still might think, “Well, that’s your truth, and we have ours.”

Thirty years of legal, suicide-affirming care has yielded its fair share of horror stories. But we don’t need to dig into the archives – just look at this past week. The Irish Independent detailed that a woman named Megan Royal found out about her mother’s assisted suicide death in Switzerland by a boilerplate WhatsApp message from the “clinic” team at Pegasos. She received her mother’s ashes by mail, a brown box with a gold sticker on it. No condolence card, no personalization. Megan had given birth to a baby just three weeks before, a grandchild now deprived of relationship with grandma.

Megan was distraught, not just at the cold, heartless way in which she was informed her beloved mother had ended her life, but because her mother, Maureen Slough, should not have qualified. She had suffered for severe depression and had attempted to commit suicide just a year prior! When Megan contacted the “clinic” that took advantage of her mother, a group known throughout Europe for previous suspicious deaths, she was informed that she, Megan, had given her consent by letter. Except Megan never wrote that letter. It very likely was forged by her mother, Maureen. So much for safeguards.

Megan is why we care. Her mother, Maureen, is why we care. All the families that have been torn apart by the knowledge that a mother, a father, a beloved uncle, a sibling fell victim to a painful death by lethal drugs – they are why we care. Put yourself in Megan’s shoes. These laws have loopholes. Thousands die each year; are we confident these are all humane deaths? If Maureen could forge this letter in Megan’s name, how easy would it be here in the States to forge a physician’s prescription form to a pharmacist for these drugs? All you’d need is an NPI number and a careless pharmacist.

PAS and euthanasia are false choices, they’re the wrong answers to real problems. Instead of shrugging our shoulders and accepting this false binary of pain or poison at the end of life, all of us should embrace best practices in palliative care where timely referral to hospice services is routine, pain is managed, patients are accompanied, their suffering is treated with compassion, and their personal, spiritual and emotional needs are met and God-given human dignity maintained. How many would still choose these tragic deaths through PAS if they were loved?

That’s why we care.

(The views expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Aging with Dignity and/or its Board of Directors.)