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NOTE: The original article was published in French in the Huffintgon Post on September 2, 2016 (read original article here >>).

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To die of hunger, to put a bag over one’s head until complete asphyxia, to shoot oneself in the heart… because we are sick, because we do not live at home any longer, because we have lost the use of our limbs, because we feel depressed with our lives.

Regardless of the method or motivation, are we are still capable of recognizing that it is suicide?

Or should the suicide prevention groups filter their calls? On the one hand those who have “bad” reasons and must be helped, and on the other, those who have “good” reasons which a doctor should follow.

The reported number of people who let themselves starve to death recently should alarm us. We sense a trend, a wave of pleas to accept other reasons as “good” and “valid” for committing suicide. We could speak of a Werther effect: a spike of emulation suicides in the wake of the publication of suicides in the media.

Instead, driven by a mechanically programmed logic, we go down the same slippery slope that Belgium has followed before us: the argument of the end of life is no longer enough. We must now extend euthanasia to those others who are in “unworthy” states.

The first injection helped lull the population into accepting a law that turned upside down all our social values… precisely on the grounds that it was only about “the end of life.” Today, we receive the second injection: one that opens the floodgates to death on demand.

Thus, the proponents who hid behind “tight criteria” are the same who now criticize the federal law because it does not go far enough. We quietly consider “the option of assisted suicide,” which was shocking us not so long ago. And we are already talking about including children without flinching, without any other consideration than “if it’s good for them!”

Meanwhile, we do not see that we are witnessing a true advocacy for suicide, by which we validate (valorize) the reasons for wanting to die. Without ever taking offense at the causes behind these reasons. Life in the nursing home is rotten? REFORM THE NURSING HOME!

For those who endorse the new logic of suicide, now well underway, a human being would be defined by its ability to “do whatever you are doing yourself by yourself,” else you are “socially and morally dead!”

Such statements – that nobody denounces in order to ride the wave – show that the “individual” choice of some is splashing over that of others. Thus, we are now in the process of dispossessing the severely handicapped (and therefore dependent) of the indisputable status of “human being” for the sole reason that they can not “do it all by themselves”!?!

A human being should “qualify?” Meet “standards?” Otherwise it would be justified to want to die? No wonder, in this context, that minimal protections, which can only reduce the risks inherent in any law on euthanasia, are deemed “obstacles.”

And everyone applauds so much “compassion"…