Canada continually has extended its euthanasia program to less and less grievous conditions, and was set to offer euthanasia to the mentally ill until public outcry slowed the process. In the Netherlands, proposals are on the table for an expansion of euthanasia to anyone over age seventy-five. A woman who lost two family members and a friend to euthanasia in Belgium told me in exasperation: “You know, it’s really becoming the preferred way to die.”

Last week, the U.K. came a step closer to legalizing assisted suicide. Except that proponents were careful never to use the word “suicide,” despite the bill’s very clear amendment of the 1961 Suicide Act. In the debate that preceded the vote, advocates preferred euphemisms such as “the right to die” and “dignified death.” A government that couldn’t wait to lock down longer and harder just a few years ago suddenly extolled the sacred principles of “autonomy” and “choice.”

Hidden behind the euphemisms is a desire to sanitize and destigmatize the profound act of taking one’s life. Linguistic sleights of hand hide what is really going on: In legalizing what was once called “euthanasia,” we are not expanding freedom but normalizing the suicide of the vulnerable as a good and laudable choice. The idea that it can ever be “good” for a human being to commit suicide brings us to the final stage in society’s devaluation of human life.

The stigma against suicide is being removed, and in an insidious manner. Suicide is being transformed into a sanitized and bureaucratic process, overseen and sanctioned by government. Outside of this bureaucratic context, suicide, and death more generally, remain stigmatized. This is how it should be. Anthropologists have long described cultural taboos surrounding death. The taboos exist because death is a momentous event, with great potential for chaos and disruption. The stigma around death reflects the gravity of social rupture and prevents death’s reduction to the mundane. In this way, as Roger Scruton once argued,

Stigma is not an act of aggression but a sign that we care about our neighbors’ lives and actions. It expresses the consciousness of other people, the desire for their good opinion, and the impetus to uphold the social norms that make judgment possible.

The stigma against suicide, in particular, acts as a safeguard, affirming the value of our bonds with each other, and preventing suicide from being normalized or trivialized.

Destigmatization is not a neutral act. The removal of a stigma makes a thing not merely permissible, but normal. And in contemporary society, what is normal is good. In The Taming of Chance, his 1990 history of probability, Ian Hacking explains how the concept of normality has taken on a prescriptive edge. As social statistics rendered social life more predictable and governable, what had once been a statistical agglomeration of differences became a statement about how people “should” be. In other words, to normalize came to mean “to make it good.”

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