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Student Lilia Ellis on the Ethics of Assisted Suicide
August 5, 2026
Illustration by Michael Morgenstern
In a new essay for The Christian Century, Ellis argues that debates over physician-assisted suicide skip past a more basic question: why people are in pain, and why their illnesses are considered incurable to begin with.
Divinity School student Lilia Ellis published "The Social Failure Behind Assisted Suicide" in The Christian Century, drawing on her own experience with myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), a poorly understood chronic illness, to challenge how both sides of the physician-assisted suicide (PAS) debate frame the issue. Advocates and opponents alike tend to treat pain and incurability as fixed facts, she writes, rather than asking where they come from.
Ellis traces her own illness's lack of treatment options to decades of low federal research funding, a pattern she connects to broader disparities in how illnesses affecting women and other marginalized groups get studied and believed. "It is a social failure, not a biological fact," she writes of ME's untreatability.
The essay extends that argument to isolation, disability, and mental health, drawing on assisted-suicide data from Canada and the Netherlands to show how inadequate social and medical support, not just illness, often shapes who chooses PAS. Ellis calls for a Christian ethic grounded in mutual obligation, rather than individual autonomy, as the more honest response.