TikTok creators are romanticizing 'assisted dying' as part of a social media trend, despite the deadly and disturbing nature of the practice.

Key Takeaways:

• During the COVID-19 pandemic, a social media trend encouraging users to "romanticize your life" began, and continues to be popular today.

• This has spread to euthanasia, in which users portray physicians killing their patients in a gentle, attractive manner.

• The reality of euthanasia and the pain it causes is ignored.

The Details:

The "romanticize your life" trend took off on TikTok during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, encouraging users to promote the simple, routine things they do.

"It asks us to appreciate what we have right in front of us and to live with intention, no matter how mundane our daily rituals might be — a reminder to look for moments of beauty and embrace minimalism," Christina Caron wrote for the New York Times. The trend went viral, with hundreds of millions of views across tens of thousands of videos. It persists today, and has begun spreading into a far more disturbing realm: promoting euthanasia.

Nora Kenney Mitaga reported on the trend for Word on Fire, saying the videos often feature attractive content creators posing in an aesthetic environment, with a soft, sad song playing in the background.

One user, Ali Tate, documented her grandmother's assisted death. In one cheerful video, she shared a before-and-after style transformation of their last dinner together before her grandmother was killed. In another, she interviewed her grandmother about why she chose to be killed.

"It's like the light at the end of the tunnel," her grandmother said, and then explained what doctors ask her during the euthanasia process. "Your diagnosis, if it's fatal. How many more months do you have? They give you time to consider. They keep stressing the fact that you can always change your mind."

In an example of the "romanticize your life" trend, Tate lays in a bed looking beautiful and sad, as a soft, sad song plays.

Tate's videos got over 20 million views.

Another creator's video showed her seven-year-old daughter snuggling with her great-grandfather before his life was intentionally ended.

Zoom Out:

While the trend of promoting and romanticizing assisted dying on TikTok may be getting attention now, it is not first time.

La Maison Simons, a fashion retailer based in Canada, sparked international outrage after releasing a campaign called "All is Beauty," which featured the story of Jennyfer Hatch and her decision to be euthanized at the age of 37, which she called the "most beautiful exit."

The video presents a contrast between dying in a hospital (which is presented as stark, cold, and sterile) and dying via euthanasia (which is presented as beautiful and peaceful).

"Dying in a hospital is not what’s natural, that’s not what’s soft. In these kinds of moments you need softness. It can take dying to figure out what living is actually like. I spent my life filling my heart with beauty, with nature, with connection. So I choose to fill my final moments with the same," Hatch said.

“Last breaths are sacred. When I imagine my final days, I see music. I see the ocean. I see cheesecake. Even now, as I seek help to end my life, with all the pain, and in these final moments, there is still so much beauty. You just have to be brave enough to see it. And seeing the rhythms of what’s gonna keep going after I’m gone, bring a lot of comfort.”

The video closed with the caption, For Jennyfer, 1985-2022.

Hatch was not initially identified in the campaign, though she was named eventually.

Before dying, she spoke in an interview about “falling through the cracks” while struggling to get treatment for Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (EDS), and it was seemingly for this reason that she considered 'assisted dying':

"I thought, ‘Goodness, I feel like I’m falling through the cracks so if I’m not able to access health care am I then able to access death care?’ And that’s what led me to look into medical assistance in dying (MAID) and I applied last year."

That reality makes the "All is Beauty" campaign even more dystopian and disturbing.

The Bottom Line:

Euthanasia is increasingly glorified, but the reality of what happens is overlooked and ignored. Those who choose it or advocate for it describe it as a peaceful, painless process in which a person suffering from unbearable pain gently goes to sleep, and then dies without any awareness.

The reality is far more disturbing; the drugs used in assisted suicide are the same as those used in death penalty executions and are known to cause incredible pain, only undetected by family and friends because a paralytic drug is given to the person first.

The paralytic means that even if the person is experiencing pain, they cannot show it, and will look still and serene.

According to one expert, Dr. Joel Zivot, the person may actually “end up drowning.”

A study in the medical journal Anaesthesia analyzed data and found that prolonged deaths were far from rare, with a third of patients taking 30 hours to die, while 4% took seven days to die. Additional experiments to find other methods have been painful as well, with one drug cocktail reportedly “burning patients’ mouths and throats, causing some to scream in pain."

Euthanasia is not gentle or romantic, but the murder of a human being at their most vulnerable moment.