For decades, advocates of physician-assisted suicide have sold the public a simple bargain: “Don’t worry, the safeguards will protect us.” The pitch is familiar—only competent adults, only with terminal illness, only under close supervision. Legislators and activists assure voters that this isn’t a slippery slope, it’s a carefully measured exception.
But reality tells a different story.
Two major investigations—Alexander Raikin in UnHerd and Elaina Plott Calabro in The Atlantic—have now stripped away the veneer. What they reveal is not a humane system of last resort but a regime collapsing under its own contradictions.
Raikin’s findings are especially jarring. In Colorado, a 29-year-old woman deemed legally incompetent to consent to treatment was nevertheless approved for assisted suicide. She was given lethal drugs while in the throes of mental health crisis. That isn’t a safeguard. It’s abandonment masquerading as compassion.
And the systemic failures don’t stop there. Washington state suspended publication of oversight records. New Mexico never issued the legally required reports. Oregon erases key data after a year, conveniently scrubbing the trail. Violations pile up, yet not a single license has been suspended. Meanwhile, legislators steadily chip away at the guardrails they once called essential: halving waiting periods, mailing lethal prescriptions, even inviting “suicide tourism” by scrapping residency requirements.
Canada shows us where this ends. When Parliament legalized euthanasia in 2016, the rhetoric was all about “strict limits.” But less than a decade later, euthanasia accounts for 1 in 20 deaths nationwide, and in Quebec, 7 percent—the highest rate anywhere in the world. Over 60,000 Canadians have died by MAID, many not because their illnesses were untreatable, but because they lacked adequate social or psychological support. A man with quadriplegia chose euthanasia over enduring a bedsore. A woman with ALS opted for MAID because she was granted only 55 hours of home care. A disabled veteran was denied a wheelchair lift—yet offered euthanasia instead.
This is not “medical aid in dying.” It is the normalization of death as policy. It is a society telling its most vulnerable: you are too burdensome to save.
The lesson could not be clearer. Once the line is crossed—once physicians are given the authority to deliberately end life—the so-called safeguards crumble. What begins as a narrow exception metastasizes into a culture where death is easier to prescribe than care.
Most U.S. states have resisted this siren song, and rightly so. Massachusetts legislators now flirting with Oregon-style laws should understand: there is no “state-of-the-art safeguard.” There is only a promise that will collapse, just as it has everywhere else.
