A Push into Despair: How Legalized Assisted Suicide Creates the Desire to Die

This essay argues that legalized assisted suicide is a temptation to despair that pushes those most vulnerable into despair, creating desire for the kind of death that such laws sanction. Laws that permit assisted suicide are messages that communicate to those whose conditions satisfy eligibility criteria that their society does not need them. This essay examines the impact of such a message on those who are vulnerable to despair. According to Gabriel Marcel, relationships of love are the means by which one endures through challenges and transcends to fullness of life without falling into despair. Relying on Marcel's account of hope and despair, I argue that those whose social situation involves few or no such relationships of love are vulnerable to despair, and that the message of legalized assisted suicide is a force pushing such vulnerable people into despair.