In July 2014, police found the body of 18-year-old Conrad Roy inside his truck in Fairhaven, Mas­sachusetts, having died from carbon monoxide poisoning. 

As the case unfolded, it be­came apparent that a friend of his, 17-year-old Michelle Carter, had encouraged him toward suicide. In a series of texts, she repeatedly pres­sured him to go through with it by sending messages like, “You keep pushing it off and say you’ll do it but u never do. It’s always gonna be that way if u don’t take action.” 

As he sat in a remote spot in the Kmart parking lot, the truck’s cab filling up with fumes, he got cold feet and stepped out of his makeshift death chamber, seemingly conflicted about what he was doing. He then spoke with Michelle by phone, who coaxed him to continue the suicide. The call was not re­corded, but months after his death, she texted another friend and re­counted how Conrad had grown scared at the last moment, climbing out of the truck, and that she had told him to get back in. She then listened over the phone as he suc­cumbed to the fumes 47 minutes later.

Following a high profile trial that received extensive media cov­erage, Michelle was convicted of involuntary manslaughter and sen­tenced to 2½ years behind bars, of which she has to serve a mini­mum of 15 months. Prosecutors claimed that her motive may have been to gain attention and sym­pathy as the “grieving girlfriend.” 

The case drew intense na­tional and international attention, partly because it involved a rela­tionship that had played out mostly through texts and Face­book messages. Even though Mi­chelle and Conrad lived less than an hour apart, they rarely met in person. 

As Michelle was led away from the trial in handcuffs, the court of public opinion was virtu­ally unanimous in condemning her actions as reprehensible. Her actions and the trial proceedings, however, also opened up broader questions about provocation to­ward suicide in a society like ours that increasingly devalues human life. In fact, the public reaction to Michelle’s behavior reveals a striking irony at the heart of Conrad’s suicide. 

The irony involves the moral outrage that surfaced regarding Michelle’s text messages. Similar indignation about encouraging someone to commit suicide is, paradoxically, almost entirely ab­sent when it comes to “physician-assisted” suicide. Michelle’s text messages embraced the same key ideas that lawmakers in nine states have now enacted through legislation, namely, that it’s some­times allowable to encourage and participate in sui­cide. Most legisla­tion, however, only permits those in the medical field, those dressed in white lab coats, as it were, to be in­volved. 

This requirement seems quite arbitrary, of course, if the real goal is to alleviate suffering by eliminating the sufferer. After all, Michelle was convinced she was acting compas­sionately by assisting Conrad to es­cape from what she claimed was his misery, depression and intense emo­tional and psychological suffering. Who is to say that Michelle was wrong if the white lab coats are right? If it were deplorable for Michelle Carter to facilitate Conrad Roy's sui­cide, how can it be good for physi­cians and other health care workers to facilitate the suicides of their ailing patients who are at least as fragile and vulnerable as Conrad was?

This remarkable moral schizo­phrenia may soon be enshrined in a new piece of legislation that claims to outlaw participation in a person’s suicide. Massachusetts state lawmak­ers and Conrad's family gathered in July 2019 at the Statehouse to intro­duce Conrad’s Law, a bill making it a crime to encourage or assist a person in taking his or her life. On the face of it, the law obviously seems like a sensible piece of legislation, but even as lawmakers were trying to stop people from assisting at suicides like Conrad Roy’s, they were simultane­ously seeking to protect medical per­sonnel who might assist at the sui­cides of their patients. The double standard was impossible to miss, with Conrad’s Law including an explicit subsection exempting those involved in physician-assisted suicide from prosecution. Even though physician-assisted suicide is not yet legal in the Massachusetts Commonwealth, an­other bill promoting it is under active consideration by the legislature. 

Society really can’t have it both ways, glamorizing the act of suicide in some cases and demonizing it in oth­ers. By yielding to the proposition that suicide is not an evil to be repu­diated, but a form of “relief” to be conferred on those who suffer, we effectively abandon our neighbors, the Conrads and countless others, in their moment of greatest need.

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