Why You Shouldn't Kill Yourself: Five Tricks of the Heart about Assisted Suicide

Suicide, for years, has been a public health crisis in the Western world. Yet more and more states and countries are allowing physician assisted suicide or euthanasia. Have you wondered whether it is actually wrong to end your life if you are mortally ill? Susan Windley-Daoust engages in an extended discussion with a game dialogue partner who thinks that there are five good reasons to employ physician-assisted suicide--and proves those common reasons (or "tricks of the heart") may be well-intended, but make no moral or spiritual sense. She argues that PAS is based in medical ignorance, a utilitarian understanding of the human, and a spiritual vacuum--and the Christian Church needs to engage these realities quickly and directly by recovering the art of dying well. This book is written to all those considering the issue, from those considering PAS as an option in their own lives, to those called upon to vote on the legality of PAS in their states, to those who minister to the dying.

Susan Windley-Daoust is Associate Professor and Chair of Theology at Saint Mary's University of Minnesota. She is the author of Theology of the Body, Extended: The Spiritual Signs of Birth, Impairment, and Dying (2014), and The Gift of Birth: Discerning God's Presence in Childbirth (2015), and numerous articles.