Browse social media and you may come across the artistically produced video of a woman imagining her “final days.” The video has been accused of both promoting and romanticizing assisted suicide, with commentators likening the “ad” to the kind of activity “Hitler and Goebbels were doing in Germany, pushing the murder of the ‘unfit.’”
The partial, widely seen story
“All Is Beauty” was released Oct. 24, 2022, by the Montreal-headquartered clothing retailer Simons. It tells the story of Jennyfer Hatch, a British Columbia woman who had a painful genetic condition called Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. At 37 years old, Jennyfer was approved for assisted suicide, and she was euthanized just days before the film came out.
The full three-minute video opens with a caption that says “the most beautiful exit.” A clip of it spreading online highlights a majestic beach with the sun shining down on musicians playing instruments. It shows visuals that give the appearance of being underwater, or feasting with friends, in an enchanting environment.
The narrator is Jennyfer herself. “Dying in a hospital is not what’s natural,” she said. “Last breaths are sacred. When I imagine my final days, I see bubbles. I see the ocean. I see music. I see cheesecake. Even now, as I seek help to end my life, with all the pain, and in these final moments, there is still so much beauty. You just have to be brave enough to see it.”
It ends with the words, “For Jennyfer,” with two dates on the screen: the date of her birth, June 1985, and the date of her death, October 2022.
Before long, it garnered millions of views.
Simons CEO Peter Simons argued that the video is “obviously not a commercial campaign” but an effort by the company to use its “privilege” to promote “human connection” and “hard beauty.” As he put it, “we sincerely believe that companies have a responsibility to participate in communities and to help build the communities that we want to live in tomorrow, and leave to our children.”
The Full, Less Told Atory
What the video—especially the clipped version circulating the internet—doesn’t detail is the full story about Jennyfer. While it effortlessly paints euthanasia as a good, liberating option for those suffering with illness, it doesn’t so much as hint at the fact that Jennyfer did not want to die. Reportedly, she chose assisted suicide only because securing “proper” healthcare failed her time and again.
Jennyfer had done an interview with a Canadian network, CTV News, that June using a pseudonym. Addressing the “chaotic and ineffective stream” of appointments she had endured, Jennyfer found herself feeling “it is far easier to let go than keep fighting.” Allegedly, even after a terminal diagnosis, Jennyfer wasn’t even offered “appropriate” palliative care, which is designed to help provide comfort during a person’s final days.
But according to National Post reporting, doctors were quick to approve her application for MAiD—Medical Aid in Dying. Part of that approval, issued by Fraser Health, read as follows: “There were no other treatment recommendations or interventions that were suitable to the patient’s needs or to her financial constraints.”
As some have pointed out, none of these details were mentioned in the three-minute video curated to capture Jennyfer’s last days.
A friend of Jennyfer, Tama Recker, told CTV that “part of what Jennyfer wanted to do is get people talking” about the “very broken” healthcare system. And according to National Post, this very case “fits into an ever-expanding constellation of Canadians who want to live, but applied for medically assisted death out of desperation after failed attempts to seek appropriate care.”
The Wider Crisis
The main reason this video has resurfaced four years after the fact is because it’s been widely criticized as being “a glitzy corporate endorsement of Canada’s rapidly expanding MAiD regime.” In an age where euthanasia is running rampant, no country is as far along in what many view as medical malpractice as Canada.
Assisted suicide was made legal in 2016, and the number of Canadian people who have died by euthanasia in the last decade is projected to be more than 100,000. The first year alone saw at least 1,018. With a population of nearly 42 million, roughly 1 in 20 deaths in Canada have been linked to assisted suicide.
Initially, MAiD was carefully constructed as an option strictly for those whose death was “reasonably foreseeable.” But in recent years, eligibility has expanded to any Canadian experiencing a serious illness, disease or disability, an advanced state of decline that cannot be reversed, and an “unbearable physical or mental suffering” from an illness, disease, disability or state of decline that cannot be relieved under conditions that the patient considers acceptable.
Notably, MAiD’s official page states a fatal or terminal condition is not required to be eligible for state-sanctioned killing. Canadian Parliament Members are actively debating whether mental illness can be used as the sole reason for pursuing euthanasia.
And in a country that already has one of the highest rates of assisted suicide deaths in the world, the assisted suicide advocacy organization Dying with Dignity Canada has, by its own volition, spent nearly $1 million in advertising on Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram.
It’s not just Canada
While Canada in many ways has been leading the charge, euthanasia rates are growing globally.
At least 13 U.S. states plus Washington, D.C., have legalized MAiD. The suicide pod, Sarco, was invented by Australian euthanasia activist Philip Nitschke, developed by his major international euthanasia and so-called “right-to-die” organization Exit International, and advertised as the “Tesla of euthanasia.”
Just weeks ago, a toddler with severe disabilities in the Netherlands, not even 2 years old, was euthanized—even as several Dutch doctors argued the child could have improved under different medication.
Canada’s video sparks renewed outrage
As euthanasia rapidly spreads across the globe like a cancer, vocal critics haven’t held back—especially in light of the resurfaced 2022 video that came out of Canada.
Prominent Christian commentators call the glamorization of assisted suicide “Satanic pro-murder propaganda,” not unlike the acts committed by Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, one of Hitler’s closest friends and the head of propaganda in Nazi-run Germany.
“There is something deeply wrong with trying to make assisted death look beautiful, peaceful, romantic or inspirational,” political commentator Gunther Eagleman said. “Death should never be marketed like a lifestyle choice. A civilized society should be fighting to give suffering people hope, care, dignity and a reason to keep going, not wrapping assisted death in soft music and pretty imagery. That is not compassion. That is a line we should never normalize.”
Riley Gaines, all American swimmer and prominent advocate for protecting female sports, noted how death is being advertised “like it’s just a fun day in the sun at the beach. Jesus, come back now.”
Echoes of Soylent Green
Some have connected the romanticization of Jennyfer’s death to that portrayed in the 1973 dystopian film Soylent Green. Sol, on his deathbed after seeking assisted suicide, is shown a carefully staged farewell: a private chamber, chosen music, and a luminous montage of forests, oceans, wildlife and an Earth that no longer exists. “Isn’t it beautiful?” he asks as he dies—and as the state turns dying into spectacle.
In the 1973 film, many understood that pageant to serve as a warning of a society that had learned to make state-administered death look gentle, even gorgeous or normal. “All Is Beauty,” some have argued, stages a similar last scene: the hospital room dissolving into Tofino’s shore, sand spirals erased by the tide, friends gathered in white, firelight in the woods, and Jennyfer’s own words narrating it all. Though this time, there is no warning. Only a retailer’s logo at the end.
Relevant Bible passages to ponder: Ecclesiastes 8:8, Luke 12:7, Matthew 11:28, Psalm 34:18
