Published March 6, 2025
Canada’s laws on medically assisted dying are remarkably progressive even by today’s standards. In 2022, the government reported that 4.1 percent of all deaths in Canada were medically assisted suicides, reflecting a 31.2 percent increase from 2021. That is nearly one in twenty deaths.
The superficial argument for such deaths is the utilitarian one, namely that they reduce the amount of unnecessary suffering the individual is enduring. Once upon a time, this had a specious plausibility when referring to those in agony at the very end of a long struggle with terminal illness. Inevitably, however, there has been a shift over time. The definition of unbearable suffering has tilted more and more in a psychological direction. And psychological suffering, unlike the physical variety, is a far more subjective and tricky phenomenon to judge relative to objective criteria. There is also that shift in the cultural imagination: Once euthanasia becomes an acceptable medical procedure for treating pain, uncomfortable questions about the appropriate use of medical resources to prolong lives, particularly those of the elderly, start to emerge. With all the predictability of a Hegelian dialectic, what started as a liberation from suffering has turned into the condemnation of others to an unnecessarily premature death.
There are some exceptions to lowering the qualifications for such “treatment,” however, which are instructive. Two men who underwent gender reassignment surgery with predictably unhappy results were refused death permits. I say “predictably” because suicide rates among those who have tried to transition are catastrophically high compared to the general population. Both of these individuals were ideal candidates for medically assisted suicide in this age of therapeutic values and psychologized selfhood. One candidate committed suicide because of a government-imposed delay on assisted death for those with mental illness. The other case involved an indigenous person in constant physical pain because of the butchery done to his body by the surgery. Mental discomfort was only part of his case. His physical distress was undeniable.
Each case highlights the terrible confusions that emerge when a society has no coherent understanding of what it means to be human and what humans are for. For example, a nonprofit filed a suit against the Canadian federal government in August last year, claiming that to prevent those with mental illness from having access to assisted suicide is discrimination. The claim is itself a measure of deep insanity. And it is tempting to interpret as ideological the refusal of assisted suicide to the man struggling with (again) the entirely predictable physical agony and associated mental strain caused by transgender surgery. For to grant such a request would be to concede what is clear from the data: Transgender surgery does not work. The internal contradictions of a progressive anti-humanism manifest themselves here, at the cost of tragic human suffering.
America has (thankfully) yet to reach the depths of Canada’s culture of assisted suicide. But the lack of a coherent anthropology already shapes medical policy. President Trump’s actions on transgenderism in sports and the military are a welcome move toward sanity. But his actions on IVF reveal that he is not guided by a coherent understanding of what it means to be human. As with Canada’s euthanasia laws, taste and not anthropology rules the day. Elon Musk’s family experience has left him rightly disgusted by those who press transgender treatments on the vulnerable. But the tech-libertarianism that drives so much of the Silicon Valley imagination loves IVF and associated technologies. The difference derives from matters of contemporary cultural preference. This can only lead to chaos in the long run, however grateful we should be for the policies addressing the transgender issue. If I were a betting man, I would put money on the emerging tech bros deciding what it means to be human for the rest of us. That is not a hopeful scenario, and it will have social and cultural consequences. Medical ethics—from issues of life to issues of death—needs a stable anthropology as its foundation. Neither Canada, nor the U.S.—nor any other Western country, for that matter—seems to be able to articulate one at this moment in time.
Ours is an age marked by anti-humanism. By that I mean that we live at a time when the very nature of what it means to be human is not simply something upon which there is currently consensus. Many assume that there can never be such a consensus. For how can we find widespread agreement on the matter of human nature when it does not exist, its various expressions deemed nothing more than manipulative power plays by one group to marginalize others? That this is not an abstract question for philosophers in seminar rooms should be clear from the rise in assisted suicide to the insanity of trans surgery to the confused approach to anthropological issues that is already characterizing the current administration. The end result can only be more unnecessary human suffering.
Carl R. Trueman is a fellow in EPPC’s Evangelicals in Civic Life Program, where his work focuses on helping civic leaders and policy makers better understand the deep roots of our current cultural malaise. In addition to his scholarship on the intellectual foundations of expressive individualism and the sexual revolution, Trueman is also interested in the origins, rise, and current use of critical theory by progressives. He serves as a professor at Grove City College.
