When a Brussels couple revealed that they were planning to die together in the world’s first “couple” euthanasia in 2014 despite not being terminally ill, the announcement was met with shock. 89-year-old Francis and 86-year-old Anne said their decision was driven by a fear of loneliness—all three of their adult children stated that they would be unable to care for their parents and supported their decision to be euthanized.
The couple’s doctor refused to do it; their 55-year-old son tracked down a willing physician in Flanders. As the Daily Mail put it at the time, “John Paul said the double euthanasia of his parents was the ‘best solution.’” He might have more accurately called it a “final solution.”
Since then, the phenomenon of couples dying together by euthanasia or assisted suicide has rapidly grown. On November 17, the German twin sisters Alice and Ellen Kessler, famous for their singing and dancing across the continent in the 1950s and ‘60s, died by double assisted suicide. The pair were born in Nazi Germany in 1936 and rose to fame after their family fled from East Germany to West Germany in the early 1950s. They were 89. The German ban on assisted suicide was overturned in 2020.
In September, it was renowned Holocaust survivor, dancer, and memoirist Ruth Posner and her husband Michael. The two Brits died by double suicide at the Pegasos clinic in Basel, Switzerland; their friends found out via posthumous email. “So sorry not to have mentioned it, but when you receive this email, we will have shuffled off this mortal coil,” the 96-year-old Treblinka survivor wrote. “The decision was mutual and without any outside pressure.”
Michael was 97; neither was terminally ill, and friends recalled that both were healthy for their age (although the letter referenced slight loss of sight, hearing, and an understandable “lack of energy”) and remained sharp-witted. They had simply decided that it was time to die, and that they wanted to die together.
In another headline-making double euthanasia, former Dutch Prime Minister Dries van Agt and his wife were killed by simultaneously administered lethal injections on February 5, 2024. Van Agt’s organization, the Rights Forum, portrayed it as a romantic end: “He died together and hand in hand with his beloved wife Eugenie van Agt-Krekelberg … with whom he was together for more than seventy years, and whom he always continued to refer to as ‘my girl.’” Neither was terminally ill.
Dutch couple Jan Faber and Els van Leeningen, ages 70 and 71, opted to die together later that year on June 9, 2024, after Els was diagnosed with dementia. Their doctor refused to participate, and the couple instead asked a mobile euthanasia unit to do the killings. Their son asked them not to—both could have had many more years ahead of them with their loved ones. Nonetheless, they died by lethal injection in their campervan after an afternoon with their son and grandchildren. The BBC covered the double death in a glamorous, photo-heavy essay.
In 2023, 33 couples died in the Netherlands by “duo euthanasia.” The previous year, 29 couples had received duo euthanasia; in 2021, sixteen, and in 2020, thirteen. There have been previous high-profile examples as well—in 2017, Dutch couple Nic and Trees Elderhorst, both 91, died by double euthanasia holding hands after 65 years of marriage. Their daughter said that “dying together was their deepest wish.”
“In the past year we’ve seen dozens of cases of duo-euthanasia, and there’s a general tendency to ‘hero-ify’ dying together,” Theo Boer, a Dutch professor of healthcare ethics, observed. “But the taboo on intentional killing—that’s eroding, and especially when it comes to duo-euthanasia.” Indeed, as the BBC noted, “These are complex cases made even more so if one of the partners has dementia, where there can be uncertainty about their capacity to give consent.”
Boer is right. The tragic story of the Brussels couple being euthanized due to their fear of loneliness was met with collective horror; now, the media ensures that duo-euthanasia, or double suicides, is viewed as, if not heroic, then certainly romantic. The duo-euthanasia of a Canadian couple in 2018 received glowing coverage, replete with a recounting of their wartime nuptials, their happy marriage, and their relief that euthanasia was legalized so that they could “fly away” together.
The state broadcaster’s headline left no doubt about how the public should feel about the story: “‘There was no hesitation’: Why a couple married 73 years chose doctor-assisted death together.” One of their children happily reported that the public response to their parents’ duo-euthanasia had been “unbelievably positive.” (More appropriately, NBC ended their positive story on the double suicide of the Kessler sisters by including the phone number for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.)
The glamorization of double suicides has been deliberate, with “death with dignity” activists pushing fairytale endings. The media could have covered the deaths of Jan and Els by emphasizing the grotesqueness of a mobile euthanasia unit (a grim, dystopian phrase) arriving to dispatch their patients; instead, the story was presented as a sunlit happy ending to full lives. They could have done a profile on the bereft son, heartbroken that his parents denied his family more time, but facing overwhelming cultural pressure to affirm their “autonomy” and “choice.” The grief of family following euthanasia is often deep and complex.
The strategy is obvious: to propagandize the public into accepting, if not celebrating, our “new normal,” in which elderly couples are put down like household pets, doctors dispense lethal injections that remain illegal for convicted murderers, and the value of life is dictated by its subjective “quality.” To understand how this story ends, we must merely look at the beginning—at that very first case of “couple’s euthanasia” in Belgium, where an elderly mother and father chose to die because nobody was interested in caring for them—and the only “solution” to their loneliness was the Grim Reaper with a white coat and needle. We will discover, soon enough, that we are not entering a fairytale, but a nightmare.
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