Transformation of suicide: from suicide to euthanasia

Reflections on A.V. Antipov’s monograph 'Suicide and Euthanasia in Bioethics: History and Modernity'

Abstract

The article is a review of the Alexey Antipov’s book “Suicide and euthanasia: history and modernity”. The review shows how, from the fundamental scientific analysis of the phe­nomenon of suicide outlined in the monograph, the author deduces two main trends: sec­ularization and medicalization. Both imply the further liberalization of society’s attitude towards it. An analysis of the process of suicide medicalization demonstrates how the nat­ural scientific view of it first led to the practice of prevention, and then began to allow medical assistance in ending life. This view has manifested itself in two phenomena: euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide. If in the first case, assistance in ending life is carried out by a physician through deliberate intervention, then in the second, the physi­cian only indicates a means of taking life, leaving the suicider the choice to use it inde­pendently. The book shows that both phenomena emerged as an attempt to prevent spon­taneous individual suicide and place it within the framework of rational practice carried out under the supervision of competent persons. But the fact that, due to the legalization of euthanasia in some countries, medicine has become complicit in justifying deaths, fa­tally destroys the focus of medicine itself on protecting the value of life.