When a friend told me about the La Maison Simons ad that attempted to glorify the assisted suicide of 37-year-old Jennyfer Hatch, I didn’t believe it was real. I figured he was exaggerating, as is his wont.

But sadly, the Canadian fashion giant's ad was exactly as he’d described. The promotion, released just one day following Hatch’s assisted suicide in December 2022, is hideously sleek and seductive. Titled "All is Beauty," it features the kind of New Age techno you’d expect to hear in a Whole Foods store, along with glossy shots of beautiful people doing yoga on the beach and stargazers twirling papier-mache jellyfish.

The company removed the ad from YouTube and its website following a public backlash, the existence of which offers precious hope for a culture gone mad.

While difficult to watch, it is necessary to confront what the ad represents. Above all, it attempts to depict assisted suicide as a chic lifestyle choice, a preferred option of the sophisticated set. In this ghoulish vision of reality, the decision to die is made similarly to the way one selects a brand of shampoo. The dehumanizing effect of mass consumerism and corporate advertising has never been more manifest. For this, at least, La Maison Simons can claim to be exceptional.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the ad is the image of Hatch clasping her hands in the yoga “prayer pose” on the beach with a serene expression. It glorifies assisted suicide in the same way a car commercial glorifies material acquisition — the satisfied expression on the driver's face is meant to infect the audience with a desire for the product.

All of this is made more disturbing in light of the unmentioned context of Hatch's decision to die. As it happens, she chose death because she felt as if she was “falling through the cracks” of Canada’ s supposedly enlightened healthcare system as she sought treatment for Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. While it is impossible not to sympathize with someone who is suffering, true love of neighbor requires more than reflexive affirmation. It requires difficult stands and difficult questions, such as, why were La Maison Simons’s resources spent to shoot a commercial to sell hoodies and not used to secure medical treatment for Hatch’s disease? The average cost of a 30-second national TV commercial costs $104,700 . Rather than use its funds to alleviate her suffering, the fashion company chose to glorify her death.

It is tempting to brush off the incident as an aberration — certainly, one would prefer to live in a world without such depravity. But the reduction of human life to units of consumption and production is an explicit feature of the progressive, secular-humanist worldview that has thoroughly captured the 21st-century West.

Such stories are not unique to Canada. Just last week, the chairman of the Framingham Democratic Party in Massachusetts, Michael Hugo, who also happens to be the director of policy and government affairs for the Massachusetts Association of Health Boards , made a chilling remark during a city council meeting that echoes the moral vision of the La Maison Simons ad. During a discussion about the effect of crisis pregnancy centers on access to abortion, Hugo said: "Our fear is that if an unqualified sonographer misdiagnoses a heart defect, an organ defect, spina bifida or an encephalopathic defect, that becomes a very local issue because our school budget will have to absorb the cost of a child in special education, supplying lots and lots of special services to children, who were born with the defect."

Local parents of special needs children were aghast that Hugo so cavalierly reduced their sons and daughters to items on a school budget, as if it were perfectly normal to quantify the value of human life in dollars and cents. Despite issuing an apology over his baldly eugenicist comments, Hugo is facing calls to resign . Hopefully, he will. It is terrifying that a person harboring such contempt for human life should find himself in a position of authority.

A healthy culture would produce neither television ads like "All is Beauty" nor leaders with Hugo’s perverse views. Nor would it empower governments that offer euthanasia to soldiers seeking help for post-traumatic stress disorder . But ours is not a healthy culture. And we must continue to rebuke the dehumanizing ideology behind our cultural degradation with everything we’ve got.

Peter Laffin is a contributor at the Washington Examiner and the founder of Crush the College Essay. His work has also appeared in RealClearPolitics, the Catholic Thing, the National Catholic Register, and the American Spectator.