It’s chilling to recognize that “Medical Aid in Dying” (MAID) is enjoying a moment in the spotlight on TikTok—one that will likely continue to grow. The social-media platform known for encouraging users to “romanticize” mundane daily life—from morning routines to Pilates workouts—is now casting the warm glow of its viral songs and amusing taglines on a procedure deliberately intended to end patients’ lives.
Photogenic twenty-somethings with golden-blond hair, who look like they should be headed to “Bama Rush,” are instead documenting a “last day with grandpa,” to wistful “sadcore” music in the background. An account called “Anita’s Legacy,” with a Canadian flag in its name, originally focused on cooking and hospitality content, now claims to be dedicated to the memory of its original creator, dead through MAID. In an oddly chipper pinned video, Anita speaks directly into the camera: “I have passed away,” she says, explaining that the video was recorded before her death and given to her daughters to post posthumously. Another user, “wheredidbecsgo,” documented her journey toward MAID, for an audience of over 100,000 followers. After being diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, she died through MAID in July, according to her page, posting a final goodbye video on the 22nd.
Comments responding to these types of videos are overwhelmingly supportive. “She’s taking control over how she wants to spend the last part of her life. That’s beautiful and incredibly brave,” one user commented on a video about a terminally-ill grandmother. “May her passing be beautiful, celebrated, and on her own terms. Rest in power,” said another.
But don’t be fooled by “vibes.” This trend is appalling. Not only is it jarring for an unassuming TikTok consumer—innocently scrolling through sun-drenched vacation vlogs and Herbie Hunkele’s spellbinding Lil Wayne cover—to encounter a morbid video from a perfectly conscious individual casually planning his or her own death. (What song will be playing? What scented candles will be lit? Who will be in the room?) But, more importantly, it’s disturbing that we’ve gotten to the point in which MAID itself is being optimized and packaged for content, with family and friends participating in—and even celebrating—the process.
How did we get here? Assisted dying is hardly new, but in recent years, MAID has moved with remarkable speed from the margins of political debate toward the mainstream. Nowhere is the shift more apparent than among our neighbors to the North, as Canada has become the “euthanasia capital of the world.” But here in America, state by state, MAID is also gaining ground. Thirteen states now allow MAID, with New York becoming the latest to legalize it. After a decade-long legislative battle, the law, signed by Catholic governor Kathy Hochul, took effect in August.
Assisted dying is hardly new, but in recent years, MAID has moved with remarkable speed from the margins of political debate toward the mainstream.
Fortunately, many are pushing back. In New York, some of the most striking opposition to euthanasia has come from Catholic nuns who have devoted their lives to caring for the sick and dying. Four orders of religious sisters—the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, the Carmelite Sisters for the Aged and Infirm, the Missionary Sisters of St. Benedict, and the Little Sisters of the Poor—are now suing the state, arguing that its new MAID regime would force them to facilitate the very deaths their ministries exist to accompany gracefully. Bishop John Barres of the Diocese of Rockville Centre is a plaintiff alongside the sisters, and the broader New York Catholic hierarchy has rallied behind them. The New York State Catholic Conference was a prominent opponent to the law during the legislative fight, and Cardinal Timothy Dolan and Archbishop Ronald Hicks have publicly criticized it as well.
It’s understated, but there’s also pushback against the worldview of euthanasia on the silver screen. In Father Stu (2022), Hollywood all-star Mark Wahlberg portrays the true story of a boxer-turned-priest diagnosed with a devastating degenerative disease that gradually robs him of his physical capacities. While the film does not take an explicit stance on euthanasia (nor does it need to), it also refuses to treat suffering or dependence as evidence that life has lost value. Instead, Stu’s bodily decline becomes inseparable from his vocation and, in many ways, deepens it. The movie Wildcat (2023), about Flannery O’Connor, similarly testifies to the numinous power of suffering to bestow mysterious grace. The scene in which she discusses her lupus battle with her priest (played by Liam Neeson) is unforgettable. We need more stories like these.
And even on TikTok, pushback against MAID is slowly, timidly materializing. This matters, because TikTok is precisely where euthanasia can most perniciously and subtly be romanticized by unfamous, ordinary accounts. Big pro-life voices with millions of followers, like Matt Fradd and Lila Rose, are doing invaluable work warning audiences about the dangers of suicidal policies. But the normalization of MAID occurs at a different level: when average, non-celebrity influencers make ordinary-looking videos about a loved one’s goodbye, turning what should be an earth-shattering decision into something strangely unremarkable. Thus, we need resistance at that level, too.
Mario Zelaya, for example, is an entrepreneur and content creator in Canada. It’s unclear if he opposes MAID in all cases (he says, for example, in a July video, “I’m not here to pass judgement”), but in several videos, he decries observable signs that the practice does not always operate as carefully or equitably as defenders would suggest. A Salvadoran immigrant to Canada, Zelaya points out, for example, that white Canadians appear to use MAID at disproportionately higher rates than other racial groups—and that oftentimes, veterans and the mentally ill seem unfairly targeted. He makes the broader point that such stark demographic disparities should themselves raise questions about the entire practice.
Joseph Elfar, MD, is another everyday TikTok creator who has questioned the knee-jerk approval of MAID as a blanket solution in cases of physical or emotional discomfort. “Offering compassion for somebody does not include validating self-destructive or life-ending ideas,” he explained in a May video, describing the use of permanent solutions for what may be temporary conditions as “unethical.” (Requests for comment sent to Zelaya and Elfar were unanswered.)
Physician-assisted suicide is not romantic. It should not be flippantly promoted through trending audios or medical-tourism framing. The creators on TikTok who most vocally defend it—and states that offer it—often invoke the language of “death with dignity,” as does popular pro-euthanasia creator (and New York Times bestselling author) “Hospice Nurse Julie,” (Julie McFadden, RN). But that description could not be further from the truth. Real dignity doesn’t have to mean foregoing pain medication or using every available means to prolong life when death is inevitable, but it does mean honoring the full range of the human condition—including suffering and dependence—that God allows us to experience.
The support for MAID among young people, as demonstrated on TikTok, is particularly jarring. In other areas of cultural life, younger generations have shown at least some signs of becoming “post-woke”—exhibiting fatigue with certain excesses of “peak woke,” which seems to have apexed around 2020. Think of corporate rainbow-logo campaigns every June, indigenous land acknowledgments, Christopher Columbus statue protests, tedious pronoun rituals, cancel campaigns over minor comments, and the once-reflexive defense of transgender participation in women’s sports. These types of efforts are now regularly mocked by Gen Z, and in some cases dismissed as “boomerisms.” But unfortunately, if TikTok is any indication, this post-woke skepticism has not extended to their feelings on the progressive sacred cow of euthanasia.
Why is that? Is it possible that they have thoroughly internalized the logic of efficiency culture, even as they so famously denounce workism? Paradoxically, Gen Z may bristle at the idea that a worker’s value lies in his productivity—penning essays against “hustle culture,” championing “quiet quitting,” and transforming “girlboss” from an aspiration into an insult—but they remain surprisingly attached to our culture’s almost obsessive commitment to individual autonomy, clinging to a worldview that treats suffering, dependence, and diminished efficiency as problems to be eliminated.
They remain surprisingly attached to our culture’s almost obsessive commitment to individual autonomy, clinging to a worldview that treats suffering, dependence, and diminished efficiency as problems to be eliminated.
And this is not going away. A 2025 Siena College poll of New York voters showed that 54 percent of respondents ages 18 to 34 supported legislation allowing doctors to prescribe lethal drugs to terminally ill patients for the purpose of assisted suicide. This matched the support of older generations (54 percent among those aged 35 to 54, and 55 percent among those 55 and older). But opposition was also weakest among the youngest respondents: just 23 percent of 18-to-34-year-olds opposed the idea, compared with 30 percent and 29 percent, respectively, among those ages 35 to 54 and 55 and older.
These findings should set off alarm bells—or as the kids say on TikTok, “the saxophones are getting louder.”
In his final column for the New York Times, Ross Douthat acknowledged his sustained criticism of the “elite consensus” of technocratic and social liberalism and its tendency toward “overreach.” “Even when it started out in a reasonable place it didn’t know when to stop, and there was too much about human nature that it didn’t seem to know,” he wrote. MAID is one of the darkest expressions yet of this tragic—shall we say, decadent—ignorance. Americans possess extraordinary medical technology and unprecedented material comfort; yet increasingly, when confronted with suffering and dependence, our answer is not to deploy these resources to accompany the sufferer but to hasten death. Or in TikTok’s case, to romanticize it.
Like Douthat, G. K. Chesterton understood keenly that material sophistication was no guarantee against moral barbarism. “Some of the most civilized and highly organized cultures, like Carthage at its wealthiest, had human sacrifice at its worst,” he wrote. TikTok creators, of course, would be playing wistful music while decadent Carthage inevitably fell.
When it comes to physician-assisted suicide—to the normalized, unremarkable deaths of ordinary grandparents—medicine can make the process painless. Social media can present it as aesthetic and empowering. The state, obliviously, can call it dignified. But none of these veneers can ever fully absolve euthanasia of its fundamental violation of God’s plan for his children.