Thom Nickels: Euthanasia’s slippery slope is already here

I view a lot of YouTube videos, but when a friend sent me a You Tube of a grandmotherly type smoothing out what looked to be a large piece of clear plastic wrap to dorky game show music, I knew something perverse was up. Like a goal-inspired Martha Stewart, the smiling “grandmother” was precise in the way she folded over the plastic so that it came to resemble a hood. When she put a large adhesive tape along the border of the hood and inserted a nodule or a tube connector at the bottom of it, she flashed the camera an extra large smile. Finally she held the finished product in front of her face and told viewers to imagine the plastic hood over her head, with the tube connector hooked up to a helium tank. Let me say for starters that we’re not talking about deep-sea diving here. Our homey grandmother was making a do-it-yourself suicide kit, although she made certain to mention that those who wanted an already assembled “self-deliverance” kit could send a mere $80 to a mail order house in La Mesa, California. As writer Derek Humphry states in his best-selling book, “Final Exit”: “…Waiting 30 minutes to have the bag removed is not necessary – if anoxia (zero oxygen) is complete with a properly closed system and no leaks due to faulty tubing, the brain stem will have died in 15 minutes. The cause of death is severe brain damage, not suffocation….”

Mr. Humphry, who founded the Hemlock Society in 1980, died in January 2025 but not by suicide; he passed away peacefully from congestive heart failure while under hospice care in Eugene, Oregon, at the age of 94. In his book, ‘Final Exit,’ he maintained that the hood system is a “legally, safe procedure.” The hood-helium system, in fact, has been responsible for hundreds of successful suicides. Humphry wrote that the procedure is absolutely painless. “The user simply falls into a deep sleep in about two minutes. Everybody has their own style of approaching death and the way of handling their own dying event. It’s called choice,” Mr. Humphry wrote. The “self deliverance” kit for the terminally ill is marketed as a device for those who do not wish to spend months or years withstanding the painful and sometimes devastating effects of medical treatments that often do nothing but cause more pain and agony while prolonging the inevitable—death—and making doctors and insurance companies rich. The kit contains a clear plastic hood with tubing sewn in an adaptable elastic collar. There’s also a vinyl T-junction to connect the two tunes to the helium tanks. Potential customers are advised to go to a toy store and ask for a “party balloon kit” in order to purchase the supply tanks. The truth is, once you normalize euthanasia, people will be put under social and cultural pressure to kill themselves. Most people know someone who has chosen to end their own life. Growing up, the father of a high school classmate of mine killed himself in his house garage with carbon monoxide. In the 1970s a college friend of my brother’s shot himself while a brilliant student at William and Mary College. Many years later, the same student’s mother committed suicide. In the 1950s an uncle on my mother’s side hung himself in a motel room. Even as euthanasia is legal in eleven countries in the world, and in thirteen states in the Union (all blue states, by the way), the stain of suicide continues to haunt the media and in most obituaries. ‘Died suddenly’ in obituaries is often an indirect reference to suicide. “Cause of death is unknown” can be another hint, especially when there are no medical follow-ups related to the death. This became especially apparent to me almost a decade ago when I wrote a story for the Huff Post about a suicide in Center City. A friend of mine was dining in XIX (Nineteen) atop the Bellevue when he told me there was a couple, a man and a woman, in their sixties. At some point the woman got up to go to the ladies’ room, and as soon as she left the man left the table, walked over to the restaurant’s huge balcony window, and jumped out onto Broad Street.

My friend told me that after the man jumped, a waitress fainted on the floor. “I’m a wreck,” he said. “I haven’t been able to sleep ever since.” At the time I checked all the local news venues and found nothing on the incident. A man jumps from a Center City restaurant shortly after Noon, on Broad Street nonetheless, and not a single bit of information about it in the media. How is this possible? Years ago, I had heard stories about the suppression of suicide stories because of their unpleasant nature. Some news outlets don’t want to upset readers but yet they think nothing of publishing stories about mass murders and serial killers. The Center City suicide was a very public event, however. The man in question chose a public venue in the middle of the day in a crowded, popular restaurant, and he chose to jump into Broad Street, which has thousands of people and vehicles moving up and down from north to south at any given time. The choice of Restaurant XIX was also a dangerous choice because of the possibility of pedestrians on the sidewalk. What if the man had fallen on top of someone? What if his suicide led to other deaths or permanent injury? No doubt this unfortunate man wanted to create a sensation of some kind.

At the time I called Restaurant XIX to see if management would confirm that a patron had jumped from one of their windows but I didn’t get very far. “We have no comment, sir,” I was told. When I made a second call to hotel management, I was told that a man was found dead on the sidewalk in front of the hotel, but there was no mention of his having jumped from the restaurant. There can no doubt that for surviving loved ones a death by suicide generates more emotion than do so called ‘natural’ deaths. Ending one’s own life is a terrifying act. Granted, it might be foolish, rash and even sinful, considering that many of life’s problems have a way of disappearing over time. But what does one say to a terminally ill person who feels that he or she has no other way? “Life is meditated suicide,” Susan Sontag once wrote. If this is true, then the person who smokes, drinks or uses drugs against specific doctors’ orders is fashioning their own homespun helium hood. Is a suicide that takes five years any different from one that takes 20 minutes? A protracted suicide may not be as dramatic as the twenty-minute exit; it may even give the impression that the person in question is being “attacked” from exterior forces, rather than “harming” themselves. Meditated suicide is also socially acceptable. How many times have you heard a person with a whisky/cigarette laden voice say (between coughs), “Oh, nobody gets out of here alive, you gotta die some way!” I’m reminded of all the men I frequently observe at my neighborhood Wawa obsessed with buying chewing tobacco. Smokeless tobacco exposes one to 25 cancer-causing chemicals, according to the American Cancer Society. Chewing tobacco is also the direct cause of throat and esophageal cancer. This is a form of meditated suicide, for sure. Some religious people affirm that suicides go directly to hell or have to pay for their transgression in the afterlife in unusual ways, but no truly spiritual person would dare pretend to know the “mind” of God in each and every case. While I generally loathe the idea of suicide, for one terrifying day back in 1994 when my mother lay dying of lung cancer, our family had to decide whether or not to follow a doctor’s advice — to give her a huge dose of morphine so that she could pass quickly and painlessly, rather than endure more torturous days. As we debated this issue amongst ourselves and prayed that “this cup would pass,” we were spared making a decision when, six hours later, Mom died in her sleep.

GOD BLESS THE SSPX, the true Catholic Church