The issue of assisted suicide has been pushed forward in legislatures across the United States with the claim that so-called “safeguards” will protect the vulnerable. Advocates promise that only adults of sound mind facing terminal illness would ever qualify, and that strict oversight would prevent abuses. But the evidence shows otherwise, and the expansion of euthanasia in Canada stands as a grim warning of where this path leads.
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In a recent Boston Globe opinion piece, columnist Jeff Jacoby addressed this growing crisis, citing reports from UnHerd and The Atlantic. “When physician-assisted suicide or euthanasia are legalized, guardrails soon collapse,” Jacoby wrote. He pointed to cases in Colorado, where a 29-year-old woman in a severe mental health crisis was still given lethal drugs, and to states like Washington and Oregon that have loosened rules to the point of allowing “suicide tourism.” Oversight, Jacoby argued, is “threadbare” and violations are ignored with impunity.
The situation in Canada has spiraled even further. Jacoby noted that when Parliament legalized “medical assistance in dying” in 2016, it was limited to competent adults with terminal illness. Less than a decade later, MAID now accounts for one in 20 Canadian deaths. “In Quebec,” Jacoby highlighted, “more than 7 percent of all deaths are by euthanasia — the highest rate of any jurisdiction in the world.” Cases include a quadriplegic man who sought death after developing a bedsore and an ALS patient who chose euthanasia because she could not secure enough government-funded home care. “The lesson could not be plainer,” Jacoby warned. “Legislators may promise ‘state-of-the-art safeguards,’ but those promises are illusory.”
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This debate is not merely political. The sanctity of life is rooted in the Word of God. Scripture affirms that life is a gift from the Creator, not something to be disposed of when suffering comes. Psalm 139 declares that we are “fearfully and wonderfully made,” with our days numbered by God before even one of them comes to be. Job refused to curse God and take his own life even in unimaginable pain, instead confessing, “The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”
Assisted suicide turns medicine on its head by asking doctors to become executioners rather than healers. It also rejects the biblical truth that suffering can have meaning and that God alone holds the keys to life and death. As Jacoby put it, “A decent society does not enlist physicians to end lives; it strives to relieve suffering while upholding life’s inestimable worth.”
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The push for assisted suicide in places like Massachusetts shows that this debate is not abstract. It is an immediate moral test. Christians and all who value life must stand against this practice, defend the vulnerable and remember that God’s gift of life is precious and worthy of protection.
James Lasher is staff writer for Charisma Media.
