Selling suicide

La Maison Simons, a fashion house in Canada, has produced an infomercial promoting euthanasia. The advert presents an assisted death as ‘the most beautiful exit’. ‘Dying in a hospital is not what’s natural. That’s not what’s soft. In these kinds of moments, you need softness’, the narrator says.

‘Last breaths are sacred’, we are told. Dancers holding paper lanterns accompany an attractive young woman in a wheelchair – the narrator – on an idyllic beach. Bubble wands, dinner and cheesecake with close friends, luminescent whale and jellyfish puppets, singing and being on the ocean. These all feature as time shifts between night and day. The beautiful imagery is accompanied by the kind of inspirational music you usually hear in documentaries about whales. The film ends with a dedication to the young woman at the centre of the story: ‘Jennyfer Hatch – 1985 to October 2022.’ The advert finishes with a small logo of La Maison Simons. It was released one day after Hatch’s death. She was just 37 years old.

Hatch was not terminally ill when she sought euthanasia. She suffered from complications and chronic pain associated with a diagnosis of Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a group of inherited disorders that affect the connective tissue. Since the video was released, it has emerged that Hatch had struggled to find treatment for her rare condition. And she was not even offered palliative care. After battling for years to access healthcare, she was approved for an assisted death within weeks.

Such details don’t seem to have troubled the filmmakers. Jay Chaney, chief strategy officer for the advertising agency that made the video, spelled out its purpose: ‘We had to look at this as we’re helping somebody facilitate societal change in some way… That’s the goal of advertising – to shift people, to get them to change the way they see the world.’

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