What Ever Happened to the Debate About Euthanasia?

The recent "assisted suicide" of former Dutch Prime Minister Dries and Eugenie van Agt put euthanasia back into the news--for a little while, at least.

Back in the 1990s, and their overhang into the early 2000s, the topic of euthanasia and all associated with it--like the philosophical, moral and legal question of whether human beings have a "right to die"--seems to have been much more commonly discussed than in the years since. Indeed, it seemed a "hot button" culture war topic comparable to abortion, sufficiently so that South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone devoted an episode of their short-lived sitcom That's My Bush! to it.

Little of it has been heard since--but I suspect it is not because the matter was somehow "settled" in some consensus. Quite the contrary. The evidence indicates that a majority, perhaps a very significant majority, of Americans support the right to die, but taking the fifty states as a whole very little changed legally here.

Why a gap so vast, and at the same time so unremarked?

One possibility is that the issue was crowded out by a crisis-packed century, and the explosion of conflicts that were previously suppressed rather than settled. (Remember how a certain sort of commentator was prone to claim that the country had become "post-racial" not so many years ago? They don't say that now.)

In that it may have helped that the existing situation aligned with the preferences of the right, especially given its success in driving the agenda in American politics in recent decades. There was no equivalent to Roe vs. Wade here for them to protest against--and so, as far as the media was concerned, no argument, making it that much easier for the issue to fall by the wayside.