World Health Organization Urges Decriminalization of Suicide

By | September 22, 2023

WASHINGTON, D.C., September 22 (C-Fam) The World Health Organization (WHO) recently released a policy brief calling for the decriminalization of suicide, arguing that removing legal penalties for suicide attempts will reduce suicide rates due to decreased stigma.

According to the WHO, suicide and its attempts are illegal in at least 23 countries, which are overwhelmingly in the global South.  Their argument in favor of decriminalization is that the fear of legal consequences might deter people from seeking help, and ultimately increase their likelihood to commit suicide.

The WHO cites a 2022 article to support the claim that “criminalization deters people from seeking timely help” because of stigma, although the article’s principal finding is that “the currently available evidence is inadequate to definitively claim that criminalizing suicide is beneficial or harmful for the reduction of suicide rate.”

In a larger number of countries, including many where suicide attempts are not criminalized, laws remain prohibiting the encouragement or abetting of suicide.  However, an increasing number of countries have moved in the direction of allowing assisted suicide, including Canada, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and some U.S. states.  Colombia recently became the first Latin American country to do so.

The WHO guidance on suicide decriminalization makes no mention of assisted suicide or euthanasia.  However, in recent years advocates for a so-called “right to die” have been building arguments that the right to self-determination includes a right to die on one’s own terms.

Others have argued that palliative care for those who are terminally ill should be extended to include assistance in dying.  The current WHO definition of palliative care stipulates that it “intends neither to hasten nor postpone death.”

However, according to a 2023 article in the Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, “the World Health Organization has recently retracted its definition and any official position on euthanasia.”  On other controversial issues like abortion, the WHO has frequently drawn on the opinions of UN human rights experts, such as treaty monitoring bodies, to frame them as human rights, despite a lack of international consensus.

One of the oldest treaty bodies, the Human Rights Committee, published a general comment on the right to life that, in addition to positing a human right to abortion, opened the door to treating euthanasia as permissible as well.

The WHO’s arguments against criminalization of suicide echo its arguments against the criminalization of abortion in that traditional morality is stigmatizing and harmful, and counterproductive to public health.  Criminalization leads to “fears of being judged by others, of having committed a sin,” according to the guidance.  A companion guideline focused on the coverage of suicide in the media urged news outlets to avoid using the phrase “committed suicide” as it implies criminality and, again, imparts stigma.

Similar arguments have been raised by UN human rights experts in favor of the decriminalization of prostitution, homosexual acts, and the use of recreational drugs.

For pro-life advocates who support the protection of human life from conception to natural death, the criminalization of suicide, or not, is a prudential decision for governments to make.  The increasing activism by the world’s leading health organization to promote death through abortion in the name of human rights raises concerns that the WHO will move toward promoting a “right to die,” citing similar experts and arguments.

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