Kill 'em all?

The culture of death and assisted suicide

The culture of death continues apace.

I recently listened to a shocking episode of the Breakpoint Podcast. It described how Colorado is following other “progressive” parts of the country, as well as Canada and parts of Western Europe, in advancing the practice of assisted suicide. The euphemism for this practice is MAID: medical aid in dying, but let’s not sugarcoat it. This is the practice of killing people who are sick, disabled, and elderly. If its advocates were to limit it to the terminally ill, that would be bad enough, but that isn’t happening. One current Colorado lawsuit attempts to prevent the prescription of lethal doses to people with severe eating disorders. Breakpoint reports that, “under the guise of ‘terminal anorexia,’ some doctors claim that, due to long-term effects of malnutrition, there are patients who lack the will to live and ‘simply cannot continue the fight.’”

The article continues,

Behind the second lawsuit to challenge Colorado’s assisted-suicide law is a group of disability-rights advocates led by the Institute for Patients’ Rights. They claim the law inherently discriminates against people with disabilities by singling out individuals with disabilities or medical conditions who struggle with depression and other mental health issues, including suicidal ideation. Rather than offering mental health care and suicide prevention services, as it does for non-disabled people who express a wish to die, Colorado offers those with disabilities the “option” of killing themselves. In effect, Colorado law tells people with disabilities that their lives are less valuable and not worth preserving.

Got a disability? Depressed? Feeling like life just isn’t worth the struggle anymore? Here’s an idea: just go ahead and kill yourself. We’ll even help.

Unfortunately, things are even worse outside the U.S. Canada looks down at Colorado and says, “Hold my Labatt Blue.” Today in Canada, assisted suicide accounts for one in twenty deaths. Yes, you read that correctly. Assisted suicide has been available in Canada for nine years, and now it accounts for one in twenty deaths in that country. A 2024 BBC article reports, “The figures…show that the rate of assisted dying in Canada increased by nearly 16% in 2023. This number is a sharp drop from the average increase of 31% in previous years.”

Well, then, I guess we can all breathe a sigh of relief. Assisted suicide was only up 16% that year. It’s like a pro-life renaissance!

Things in Western Europe are even worse. According to the same article, “In the Netherlands, government surveys recently uncovered ‘thousands of cases’ in which doctors ‘intentionally administered lethal injections to patients without a request,’ including ‘children, the demented,’ and ‘the mentally ill.’” By the way, that’s not suicide. That’s murder.

Photo by Raghavendra V. Konkathi on Unsplash

What happened to the world in which we told people that their lives matter, that suicide isn’t the answer? What happened to the world in which we tried to prevent suicide, rather than encouraging it? What happened to the basic principle of medicine, “First, do no harm”? If you’d told me twenty years ago that, in the U.S., we would offer to help to kill people who suffered from anorexia, I wouldn’t have believed it, but here we are. What’s next? Arthritis? Migraines? Allergies? Dandruff?

In this dystopian moment, there are no clear criteria by which we decide when to help people commit suicide and when not to do so. The primary criterion appears to be the desire to die. Suicidal ideations are no longer necessarily seen as a problem. They’re just one more aspect of the Western world’s pathological fascination with individual autonomy. The notion of innate human worth is fading from our cultural memory. The idea that there may be values more important than the value of individual autonomy is culturally out of step. Then again, Christians are supposed to be out of step. Jesus told us we would be. Why don’t we believe him?

Let me be honest: as the father of a son with disabilities, the callous targeting of people with disabilities scares the bejeezus out of me. In the Western world we’ve already drastically reduced the number of people with Down syndrome through prenatal testing and abortion. It’s not a great leap to apply pressure on families to kill people with Down syndrome when they begin to experience medical problems due to age or other factors.

That’s a slippery slope argument, you may respond. Indeed it is—and an entirely sound one at that. In a 2022 Firebrand article I argued that MAID would expand into the kind of abuses for which people in Colorado are pushing. I wish I’d been wrong, but I wasn’t. The slope is slippery. Even recently, proponents of legal assisted suicide argued that cases of people who were terminally ill and in great pain necessitated its legality. Now we’re trying to kill people with anorexia. Doesn’t that sound slippery to you? It sounds like a waterslide greased down with Crisco to me.

Here’s another way of thinking about the matter: according to the emerging ethos of the assisted suicide industry, who shouldn’t we kill? If we could answer that question, at least some people could feel safe. Without a clear answer, no one is safe—and at present, there’s no clear answer.

The church needs to wake up to what’s happening. We need to use our voices to decry the practice of killing not just the unborn, but the old, the sick, the disabled, and the mentally ill. We Protestants need to develop resources on the dignity of human life. We need vigorous conversations around the topic of theological anthropology. In other words, we need to discuss what Christians mean when we use the term “human being.” We need to make our voices known in the public sphere and mobilize our efforts to stop the abusive suicide industry that is emerging in the U.S. This means not just Substack and Facebook posts, but political action.

A society that kills its weakest members has descended into barbarism. We may cover up our savagery with polite euphemisms, but we are no less culpable. If the church will not stand up for the weak, the elderly, the infirm, and the disabled, then we have abdicated a sacred responsibility that has been ours since the time of the apostles. We are thus doubly culpable. We know better. Wake up, church. The devil is loose in the land.