It is touted as compassionate, a way to end unnecessary suffering of the terminally ill, but with fertility rates falling fast, assisted suicide could open the door to euthanasia which would target the elderly.
New York could become the 12th state to legalize assisted suicide if Gov. Kathy Hochul signs a bill that passed the state Legislature in June. In Britain, similar legislation has passed both houses of Parliament.
Except for Montana, the states that have embraced “death with dignity” are all deep blue. Liberals who support abortion, which was also initially sold as compassionate, now have set their sights on seniors. During the pandemic emergency, New York governor and now mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo put COVID-19 patients into nursing homes.
Proposed safeguards are meaningless. Under the pending New York law, two physicians would have to certify that a person with a diagnosed terminal illness has less than six months to live.
Doctors make mistakes, some lethal. Dr. Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (whose agency provided funding to an organization that then funded the Wuhan lab) went full Gestapo at the height of the pandemic.
Opponents of assisted suicide include disability activists. That they feel vulnerable is revealing. Perhaps they sense that voluntary could become compulsory.
The real danger in assisted suicide, which could easily morph into euthanasia, lies in declining fertility and the graying of society.
The U.S. fertility rate, the number of children the average woman will have in her lifetime, is 1.66, well below the 2.1 rate needed to replace current population.
This has resulted in a rapidly aging society. The number of Americans 65 and older will rise from 17% of the total population in 2022 to 23% in 2050. Schools are turned into senior centers, and adult diapers outsell baby diapers.
Other nations are aging even faster.
With a fertility rate of 1.18, China’s population declined by 850,000 in 2022. Japan’s fertility rate is 1.15.
Japan’s 65 and older population is 29% of the total, the largest in the world. Policymakers are frantic about finding a way out of this demographic nightmare. Yusuke Narita, a Japanese professor at Yale, thinks he has the answer.
“I feel like the only solution is pretty clear. “In the end, isn’t it mass suicide and mass ‘seppuku’ of the elderly?” Mr. Narita casually commented in 2021, according to The New York Times. “The possibility of making it mandatory in the future will come up in the discussion.”
You bet it will. “There is criticism that older people are receiving too much pension money and the young people are supporting all the old people,” said a leading member of the Japanese Diet.
In the United States, public expenditures for seniors are huge budget items.
Social Security costs $1.5 trillion annually, 22.4% of the total federal budget. Absent major reform, the trust fund will be depleted by 2034. Medicare cost $839 billion in 2024, more than half of all mandatory federal spending on health programs and services.
How long will a shrinking pool of young workers be willing to support a growing number of elderly? The employer/employee contribution to Social Security is 6.2% of taxable wages and is destined to grow as the trust fund fades.
The demographic crisis would not be so severe if we hadn’t aborted 63 million children since 1973. Baby boomers who thought women had a right to choose death for their unborn children may soon be confronting a death sentence of their own.
The Rev. Shenan J. Boquet, president of Human Life International, warns: “Having been so successful in preventing and killing human life at the beginning of life, the culture of death is now turning its attention to the end of life.”
There is a lethal logic here. If inconvenient lives are expandable at one end of the spectrum, why not at the other?
Adolf Hitler, not widely known for his compassion, pioneered euthanasia, or mercy killing, as it was then called. The Nazis were among the first to argue that certain lives – including those of the handicapped, mental patients and the terminally ill – weren’t worth living.
In “The Children of Men,” a novel set in a future where humanity is on the verge of extinction because of zero fertility, caring for the elderly has become so burdensome that mass suicide (in state-sponsored “quietus” ceremonies) is popular.
Assisted suicide is a death trap for the most vulnerable among us.
This column was first published at the Washington Times.