Discourse around physician assisted suicide (PAS) has centered on individual choice including the ethics of individual rights and prerogatives of both patients and physicians. This discourse has been so highly charged that even terms to describe this activity, e.g. aid in dying, physician assisted dying, among others, has been a source of heated debate. We use the term assisted suicide, with dispassionate intent, to describe the medically supported and self-directed ending of one's life, as this term, from the Latin, sui (self) and cide (killing), is literal. These rhetorical tensions between historical norms of medical practice and incipient rights has limited the attention paid to broader social and societal implications of PAS, some of which we consider in this paper.