Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look, and an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.

Last fall, to pressure the passage of what was called the terminally ill adults bill in the House of Commons,

advocates of legal suicide in the UK took a somewhat innovative approach.

They plastered the London underground with posters that really

resembled ads for things like antidepressants or headache medicine. The most prominent featured a

wealthy, healthy woman dancing in her kitchen and her PJs with a big smile on her face. The caption

read, quote, my dying wish is my family won't see me suffer, and I won't have to,

end quote. In the UK, the advertising of porridge, for health reasons ironically, and politics, is

banned on the tube, but upselling death, that's allowed. Though good Samaritans covered the

posters with information for suicide prevention hotlines,

the defenders stood by the marketing.

One spokesman said this, quote,

The campaign uses positive imagery of these people living life on their own terms,

alongside messages about why they are campaigning for greater choice, end quote.

The campaign marked a new chapter in death culture.

Long gone are the days of Jack Kovorkian peddling cold and clinical death machines.

Even the, it's the compassionate thing to do, and who wants to suffer anyway, guilt campaigns

have been traded in.

This UK campaign was about autonomy.

It was about the promise of a final way to express

one's expressive individualism. In this vision, death is the designer capstone of a fully

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