On Assisted Suicide: The Dignity Series

Assisted suicide and euthanasia are being legalized or at least debated throughout much of the world today. But should suicide ever be assisted? When someone is suffering and no longer wants to live, and asks another to help him end his life, what is the right response? In this powerful volume in Word on Fire’s Dignity Series, Stephanie Gray Connors engages both the mind and the heart in answering these increasingly urgent questions. Through ten proposed principles to help guide the conversation, On Assisted Suicide will draw readers into the mysteries of joy and suffering, life and death, and the unconditional dignity of the human person. 

Why dignity? Because human dignity (dignitas, the worthiness of each person) is the foundation of all human society. Jacques Maritain, the Catholic philosopher who helped draft the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, affirmed this in saying, “The privilege connected with the dignity of the person is inalienable, and human life involves a sacred right.”

In a time of political polarization, social division, and the ongoing “culture wars,” the Dignity Series aims to refocus our attention on human dignity. The series enters into the great mystery of human life with wonder and reverence, and unflinchingly faces grave threats to human dignity, many of them ignored in the culture today.

Each volume in the series will examine one of those threats, drawing on rational argument, spiritual sources, and above all, personal stories that take readers into the lived experience on the frontier of the issue. This broad mix of ideas and approaches acknowledges that a wide variety of backgrounds and personalities shape how we interact with these questions—and that if a book is to help us grow, it has to stir our hearts as well as activate our minds.

The Dignity Series emerges out of and points back to the whole-life ethic of Catholic social teaching, which is grounded in the principle of human dignity. “Social justice,” the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches, “can be obtained only in respecting the transcendent dignity of man” (CCC 1929). And that dignity, on the Catholic reading, can only finally rest on our status as creatures made in the image and likeness of God (Gen. 1:26). However, these books are for anyone—Catholic or non-Catholic, religious or nonreligious—who wrestles with these issues and longs to see a more informed and considerate approach to them.