England and Wales are preparing to legalize assisted suicide. The "Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill" was passed by the House of Commons in June and now moves on to the House of Lords. The bill has plenty of detractors, including the former Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May, who referred to it as the "license to kill Bill." May warned of "normalizing" suicide and of the message such a law would send to the elderly, mentally ill and disabled about the value of their lives. Kim Leadbetter, the Labour Party Member of Parliament who introduced the bill, offered the same tired assurances: The powers granted by the bill won't be abused, this isn't about devaluing the lives of the ill and disabled, and so on.
The trajectory is predictable: The bill's proponents will win, with the typical initial argument that assisted suicide or euthanasia will be limited to terminally ill adults with less than six months to live. Even that limitation glosses over what most physicians will tell you: that it is nearly impossible to predict with any certainty how long someone will live, notwithstanding the diagnosis of a terminal illness.
But it never stops there. Soon the argument becomes, "What about adults suffering from mental illness? Why should they be forced to live if they don't want to?" That, in turn, morphs into arguments that people who have no diagnosed mental illness should have access to assisted death if they're unhappy and don't want to live anymore.
Then the push comes to make euthanasia available to people under the age of 18 who are terminally ill; then, it's young people who are depressed or dealing with other mental or emotional illness.
Advocates in England cheered the bill's passage within the House of Commons as "the triumph of facts over fear." You'd think they would pay more attention to the factsin other countries where assisted suicide and euthanasia have already been legalized, like the Netherlands, Belgium and Canada.
The Netherlands legalized euthanasia and assisted suicide in 2002, and has never required diagnosis of a terminal illness as a prerequisite. The number of deaths by both has been increasing every year, and jumped 10% in just one year, from 2023 to 2024.
More worryingly, the number of people who chose to end their lives for psychiatric reasons (as opposed to terminal physical illness) rose from two in 2010 to 219 last year -- an increase of more than 10,000%. (One Dutch patient suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder ended her life because a back injury left her unable to clean as much as she wanted.) An even greater concern is that a growing number of these deaths are in people under 30; the Netherlands now permits children as young as 12 to request euthanasia.
Belgium's laws permitting euthanasia and assisted suicide are the most permissive in Europe, having eliminated all age limits in 2014. In theory, any child requesting assisted death must be in "constant and unbearable suffering," be lucid when making the choice, and have his or her parents' consent (although it is unclear what happens if the parents disagree).
Canada's Parliament passed its "Medical Assistance in Dying" law in 2016. MAID offers assisted suicide or euthanasia to anyone suffering with a terminal illness or chronic (even if not terminal) condition. Neither minors nor those with mental illness qualify for MAID in Canada -- yet. Even so, there have been more than 60,000 MAID deaths in just the past nine years.
Both England and Canada boast about their "universal health care," but both countries have yearslong wait times. England's National Health Service admits that waits for tests and shortages of physicians and hospital beds are impacting cancer diagnoses and thus access to lifesaving treatment. Canada's population is a third of England's, but wait times are just as long, if not longer. This matters because when the inevitable shortages occur, euthanasia and assisted suicide start looking like cost-cutting measures or viable options for the ill and the disabled. By way of example, disabled Canadian veteran and Paralympian Christine Gauthier had been fighting for five years to get a wheelchair ramp installed at her home and was told by the Department of Veterans Affairs that they could send her the equipment for medical assistance in dying, instead.
It isn't just the embrace of death that threatens the West. There's also abortion and the declining birth rate. None of the western European countries has a birth rate at the population replacement level of two children per family. The birth rate in the United States is barely at replacement level. Abortions were declining in the U.S. until 2017 but have been steadily increasing each year since, with more than 1 million abortions performed in 2023 for the first time since 2012.
And now American society has a new obsession: chemically castrating and surgically mutilating the bodies of otherwise physically healthy young people, rendering them incapable of sexual reproduction (and, in some cases, sexual performance or pleasure).
This is madness. Western civilization is destroying its fertility and its future.
These trends are direct consequences of the West's abandonment of Christianity, the faith that built modern Europe and which is the cornerstone of the United States of America. Christian majorities in the U.S. and in countries like France, Italy, Spain, Ireland and Canada have been ignoring the tenets of the faith, watering them down, apologizing for them, and even condemning them as "racist," "patriarchal" and "colonialist."
The results are predictably catastrophic. Christianity views the value of each God-given human life as inherent, immutable and immeasurable, not dependent upon the whims or wishes of any particular individual. That value has, among other achievements, driven unprecedented advances in medical care, healing, child life expectancy, longevity and the alleviation of suffering. It should not surprise us, therefore, that as Christianity is gradually eroded as a cultural foundation, humans become disposable rather than indispensable, and the value of life becomes transactional rather than transcendent; about money rather than morals.
As England prepares to join other nations that have legalized euthanasia and assisted suicide, it appears to miss the irony: If Christianity is cast aside, it will take Western civilization with it.
The West is killing itself.
To find out more about Laura Hollis and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2025 CREATORS.COM
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