Send an urgent message to Canadian legislators urging them to stop expanding assisted suicide
(LifeSiteNews) — On March 23, 2024, British horse riding star Caroline March died by euthanasia in an undisclosed location two years after a spinal cord injury sustained during a fall in Burnham Market. The accident ended her international career, which saw the professional event rider competing at the four-star level in events such as Blenheim, Chatsworth, and Gatcombe. The day after her death, her family posted her suicide note to Facebook.
In the letter, March stated that people had “absolutely no right to judge” her decision and that she had decided to die with a clear mind unclouded by depression. Her main feeling, she wrote, was anger, after all attempts to regain her desired quality of life post-accident failed. “Quite simply put, everything that defined me is physically not possible to do it in a way that I enjoy,” she wrote. “I hate asking for help, not because I can’t, but because I love doing things for myself and it destroys me watching people do my jobs.”
She continued (mistakes hers):
All I ever wanted was a family and I’d have given up everything in an instant for one. Two/three little sprogs running round the family farm have fun, having inherited my feral ways. I really wanted to be a young mum and dad and have I’d have been a f***ing good one. I don’t have any yet, I’m fully aware, as everyone keeps telling me, I can (potentially, nothing’s ever certain) still have children, and if I did, I would sacrifice my own happiness for theirs but I don’t. And to be honest, with the way the world is going, I don’t want to reproduce and bring them up how I now have to. The future for our kids/grandkids is what truly terrifies me. I could say so much more on this, but that’s not what this is about.
I’ve never understood society’s obsession with longevity and the need to live for as long as possible. Alan Watts, a well-known philosopher, famously said ‘I’d rather have a short life that is full of what I love doing, than a long life spent in a miserable way’. Assisted suicide is always something that I believed in and have always said that if anything happened to me and I was forced into the predicament that I couldn’t have the quality of life that I wanted, that would be the route l’d take. Not going to lie never imagined it would come to fruition but here we are. Think ‘Me Before You’.
March was referring to the film Me Before You, in which a young woman falls in love with a man in a wheelchair who had decided to go to Switzerland and be euthanized rather than live as a disabled man; even when she begs him to change his mind, he refuses, telling he that she, and his loving parents, would be much better off without him. The disability rights community responded with horror when the movie was released, noting that the message being sent was a simple one: Better dead than disabled.
That was the decision March made, too, and the fact that she references the film is telling. The entertainment industry has released many similar storylines—Million Dollar Baby, Breathe, any number of House episodes—that drive this point home. If you cannot live precisely the way you want, you can—and perhaps should—simply opt not to live at all. You are in control, and if you become disabled, it is entirely understandable that you would want to die. Who wouldn’t? Again, the message is clear: Better dead than disabled.
March writes that many people tried to talk her out of it; many showed her love. But quoting philosopher Alan Watts in the profanity-laced, angry missive, March stated that even if she could, in time, become good at other things and spend time with those she loves, she would rather die. She admitted that it was a selfish thing to do, but stated that as she’d always been selfish, there was no reason to change now. It is a shocking and heartbreaking letter from start to finish, ending with the sentence: “Life is cruel, really cruel.
I wrote, earlier this week, about an Alberta judge who just ruled that a 27-year-old woman with autism should be permitted to die by euthanasia, despite the only medical assessment concluding that she was “normal.” We are witnessing the return of eugenics, but this time we’re calling it “autonomy” and disguising our prejudices with therapeutic language. These were young women who should have had their lives ahead of them—and could have—but our culture sends them a different message: You might be better off dead than disabled.
Send an urgent message to Canadian legislators urging them to stop expanding assisted suicide
