Taboo Maintanence

I found an article on the BBC website about a practice known in the Netherlands as "duo-euthanasia." Put simply, it's when both members of a couple decide to end their lives together, because both meet the criteria for physician-assisted suicide.

After the title (Dying together: Why a happily married couple decided to stop living), there's a quick, 50-word, brief laying out some basic facts. And then, there's a warning:

Some people might find this article upsetting.

There's also another article, Boy, 13, shot dead by New York police had replica gun, authorities say. In that article is the following:

One officer then wrestled [Nyah Mway] to the floor. “During a ground struggle”, another officer fired a single shot that hit the teenager in the chest, the police chief said.

So, apparently,while one officer wrested with a teenaged suspect, another shot him. There is no warning message.

The story of Jan and Els is fairly straightforward, and presented as a human-interest piece. Jan was a retired cargo worker, in constant pain from back injuries. Els was a retired teacher and developing dementia. But it's not really a story about the couple. It's a story about the continuing debate over assisted suicide. There's no violence, no in-depth examination of the controversy surrounding the practice, no examination of trauma. Just the story of a couple in their seventies who decided that they were going to die on their own therms and together.

It was difficult to see what, other than the subject matter itself, that explained why "some people might find this article upsetting." Except for, perhaps, the warning itself. While Dr Theo Boer, professor of healthcare ethics at Protestant Theological University may worry that: "[T]he taboo on intentional killing - that’s eroding, and especially when it comes to duo-euthanasia." I don't expect to see a sudden drop in the human population due to assisted suicides anytime soon. Psychiatrist Dr Frank Koerselman, another Dutch critic of assisted suicide speaks of a person's lack of hope that things will improve as a contaminant that others can avoid. But I don't know that this is a useful way to think of it. Hope can be irrational, too.

As much as I understand the arguments that Doctors Boer and Koerselman make, I'm not sure that this is a problem in the way that they portray it. There seems to be a pervasive worry in some quarters that destigmatizing suicide will open the floodgates to all sort of problems, and completely undermine the ideal that every life is somehow objectively infinitely valuable.

I found nothing remotely upsetting in the story of Jan and Els, because there didn't need to be in order to tell it. Portraying it as a difficult story to read seems to do nothing other than reinforce a taboo that's unlikely to go anywhere soon.