We Will Have Euthanasia in the Future

Though there are plenty of youth in Asia already.Ali G.

Euthanasia is at present a controversial social issue. However, in many futuristic societies, it is a norm, and may in fact be encouraged. This is generally, but not always the sign of a Dystopia, and at the very least demonstrates the divergence between the fictional world and the actual one. A handy rule of thumb is that the consensual nature of the suicide presented is inversely proportional to how dystopian the society presented is supposed to be.

Note that, in some countries and US states, consensual euthanasia is legal under certain guidelines.

No Real Life Examples Please

Anime & Manga

 * Suicide booths were featured in Battle Angel Alita
 * Crest of the Stars features a weird sort of hereditary euthanasia. The Abh's genetic modifications include a mechanism that causes them to die painlessly when their brain starts falling apart due to old age.

Comic Books

 * The first volume of The Ballad of Halo Jones notes that the upper levels of the Hoop contain pleasant gardens that prospective euthanasiacs can visit before dying. The protagonists use them as a shortcut, and plan to say the garden's beauty made them want to live again if they get caught.

Film

 * Used in Soylent Green, as one solution to overpopulation and of course as a food ingredient. In this case, people aren't forced to suicide, but life is so bad that the distinction isn't that important.
 * Appears in Logan's Run.
 * Also appears in Children of Men in the form of a highly successful pharmaceutical campaign selling what are essentially suicide pills. Parallels to antidepressants are not entirely subtle. Then again, it does lead to a Tearjerker moment . One dark touch is that an advertisement mentions they're offered free to illegal immigrants.
 * To put into context, the plot of the movie is that mankind have lost the ability to have children, and many people have despaired, knowing that the species is doomed.
 * Freejack. An advertisement for Dial A Suicide can be seen at one stage.
 * In Children of the Corn, any of the Children who turns 19 is obliged to walk out into the cornfield and be taken by He Who Walks Behind The Rows. A partial subversion, as they don't realize they're going to die.
 * One of the many signs of decadence of the great city in Barbarella is a nightclub-like place offering "unique and interesting ways to die."

Literature

 * It is one of the themes of "The Repairer of Reputations", a short story by Robert Chambers which introduced The King in Yellow. The story, written in 1895, depicts a society of 1925 where "Government Lethal Chambers" have become widespread, so that people can self-euthanize without hassle. That makes it just about Older Than Radio.
 * The Giver. Everybody except the Receiver of Memories has then right to commit suicide whenever they want and euthanasia (which is called being "Released to Elsewhere") is practiced on the elderly, the smaller of twins, and babies that don't develop correctly, as well as on people who cause too much trouble (airplane pilots who make too many mistakes, for instance). Consent is an issue in the latter case, though, since they don't know it's euthanasia rather than exile.
 * The Culture is basically a Utopia and has technology which can keep you alive and young forever, but there is kind of a thought that you should go peacefully at some point. This might entail dying of old age, but it can also be in the form of Nothing Left to Do But Die.
 * Appears in Time Enough for Love - "Death is Every Man's Privilege."
 * Happens in a short story in Kurt Vonnegut's "Welcome to the Monkey House". There it's encouraged by the government in order to bring down the human population to manageable levels. (And those who administer the drug are voluptuous babes who dress in transparent clothing so that sex becomes as unappealing as possible.)
 * Also in another of Vonnegut's short stories, "2BR02B". (The zero is pronounced "naught".) Aging has been cured. To keep the population of the United States from exceeding forty million people, the law of the land says that before anybody new can be born, somebody must volunteer to die. Anybody who feels like dying arranges to do so by calling the phone number which is the title of the story and making an appointment. The protagonist of the story is distraught because his wife is about to have triplets, but he's only found one person willing to die.
 * Isaac Asimov's Pebble In The Sky has the natives of a backwater, slowly dying future Earth holding to a custom of being executed when they reach "The Sixty" -- their sixtieth birthday. Anyone who is unable to work is also euthanized.
 * And in Prelude to Foundation, it is mentioned that there are no problems to legally commit suicide on Trantor.
 * The Tripods. In "The City of Gold and Lead" human slaves go to booths were they can be killed painlessly once they've become too worn out to serve their Masters. Given the high gravity of the city, this only takes a few years.
 * In the future of the Christ Clone Trilogy, "life completion clinics" become commonplace. In-story, they are noted as having an almost preternatural tendency to know when someone is going through a difficult, depressing time, and sending them bright and cheery brochures advertising their services.
 * In Oryx and Crake, people compete to feature on nighty-night.com, in which their suicide is streamed live for entertainment.
 * In the short story "The Sooey Pill", everyone is issued a poison tablet so they can commit suicide whenever they feel like it.
 * In Dreamsnake, it's likely that moments before . The fact remains that a quick death by cobra bite was deemed preferable to.

Live Action TV

 * In an episode of Star Trek the Next Generation, there is a society where everyone commits suicide at the age of 60. Originally to alleviate the strain of paying for keeping the elderly alive, it has become a way of honoring the individual and their family.
 * Vulcans and Klingons both have practices where a sufficiently crippled or incapacitated individual may opt to die.
 * Star Trek the Original Series In "A Taste of Armageddon" they're used in lieu of nuclear warfare; computers select those who have been 'killed' in each attack, and the victims report voluntarily to the suicide booths, thus sparing their civilization the horrors of mass destruction. Things go well until Kirk and his crew are designated dead.
 * In "The Mark of Gideon," an extremely overpopulated world is trying to set up a voluntary suicide system, starting by infecting the leader's daughter with a disease.
 * An episode of Sliders had them travel into a world where kids had taken over, and it was illegal to live too long, as low as 50 in some states.
 * And one where there was a kind of weird lottery. Someone would draw money from a machine (No limit was stated). Later, several people who drew money would be selected to "Make Way", and be given a huge amount of money, plenty for one last hurrah and to take care of their families. The more money you took, the greater your chance of being selected. (Not that the person who drew the most would be automatically selected, it seemed to work more along the idea of having more tickets in a raffle). Of course one of the main characters are selected before they are aware of all the details...

Music

 * The Zeromancer song "Doctor Online" is a about "1-800-Suicide," a service offering the impatient ways to end their lives.

Video Games

 * An email in Deus Ex advertises a suicide clinic, offering its users ten thousand credits to his or her survivors should they visit.
 * Hell MOO includes a suicide booth in Freedom City where those who are suffering from post-apocalyptic depression or just plain boredom can off themselves. Of course, the cloning centers still function perfectly and automatically shuffle your soul into a new body when you die, so as long as you have a clone available there's no way for anyone in Freedom City to ever die; it's established that many of the denizens of the city were around before the Collapse and have just kept living for centuries.
 * And since the bodies are taken naked to the recycling center across the street, all of their possessions are left in the booth prime for the taking.
 * Fallout New Vegas features a Vault which required one of its population to be sacrificed every year in order to keep the remainder alive (for no reason other than that it's builders were huge jerks). The sacrifice sequence mirrors the Soylent Green example above. The Vault's residents elect the person they consider the worst member of their society for the annual sacrifice. Anvilicious.

Western Animation
"Fry: Fetal stem cells? Aren't those controversial?
 * Parodied in Futurama with suicide booths. In DVD Commentary, the writers and cast of Futurama did note that they played down the suicide booth angle as the series went on, as it had lost its novelty and served its purpose of showing how different the future was.
 * A related discussion, next to a large swimming pool-sized vat of stem cells.

Farnsworth: In your time, yes. But today,... shut up. Besides, these are adult stem cells, from perfectly healthy adults... whom I murdered for their stem cells."