The Slippery Slopes of Assisted Suicide and Abortion

By: Chuck Donovan, originally published October 28, 2025, The Washington Stand

As 2025 enters its final months, battles over the legalization of assisted suicide continue to advance toward uncertain outcomes. The battlefields include the British House of Lords, New York State, and the Australian State of Victoria. Meanwhile, the clock continues to tick on the expansion of “access” to assisted suicide in Canada, where the effective date has been moved to March 17, 2027 for “medical aid in dying” (MAID) to become available for people whose “sole underlying condition is a mental illness.”

Altogether, the pending proposals and arguments on their behalf illustrate what Wesley Smith calls the “slippery slope” of assisted suicide: “The ultimate destination for all of this will be the creation of a fundamental right to be made dead, regardless of the reason, i.e., death on demand.”

This trend is unmistakable in the way laws in various American states have evolved toward ever looser standards, but it seems ever clearer in the language employed by assisted suicide advocates. The group Death with Dignity  published an article  last July bestowing praise on three governors who signed assisted suicide bills (in California, New Jersey, and Maine) and urging New York Governor Kathy Hochul (D) to do the same before the end of the year, when she must decide whether to approve or veto a legalization bill that has reached her desk. The article cites statements by each of the governors. New Jersey’s Phil Murphy (D) says that assisted suicide provides terminally ill patients and their families with the “humanity, dignity and respect they so richly deserve at the most difficult times any of us will face.” Maine’s Governor Janet Mills (D) goes further and declares, “It is not up to the government to decide who may die and who may live, when they shall die or how long they shall live.”

Mills’s paean to laissez-faire mortality is a far cry from the thought of Thomas Jefferson, who  wrote in a letter  to the Republicans of Washington County, Maryland, on his retirement from the presidency: “The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government.”

As debates proceed around the world, advocates for the expansion of the categories and conditions under which suicide can be pursued are making their intentions plain. Chief among these debates is the one that has lasted in the British Parliament for more than a year. At each stage of the multi-step process toward the adoption of this landmark law, the measure has lost support. Some proponents, like chief sponsor MP Kim Leadbeater, have touted the bill’s safeguards against abuse. But not all supporters have done so, especially Lord Falconer, who first introduced a legalization bill more than a decade ago.

Falconer is now the prime sponsor of assisted suicide in the House of Lords. In the intricate process required to approve the measure in Parliament, the Falconer-Leadbeater bill survived  second reading  in the House of Lords in mid-September. Because of its faltering support — speakers against the bill heavily outnumbered supporters — Lord Falconer agreed with opponents to conduct a committee review of the bill for potential amendments. The report of the committee is due by November 7, which would pave the way for a third reading beginning November 14 during which further amendments could be considered. The aim of assisted suicide supporters is to see the bill approved by the Lords before the end of the year, when it would otherwise expire, and then present it for royal assent, the traditionally pro forma approval by King Charles that would make it British law.

The Select  Committee review  is now underway, but it too is meeting severe criticism. Opponents complain that the committee is relying solely on the advice of “experts” who have previously participated in the bill’s process and that the committee will not take oral or written testimony from outside critics of its inadequacies and harms. Lord Falconer’s remarks have not alleviated that criticism.  Speaking in committee  this week, he reportedly said that people with “learning difficulties or autism” could, with “proper assistance,” access assisted suicide. It has been many months since assisted suicide sponsors abandoned the original bill’s guarantee that assisted suicide cases would be individually reviewed by the British courts — the posture now is for cases to be handled by an expert panel without judicial review.

The message is clear that once introduced, assisted suicide will begin, as Wesley Smith has documented, a relentless course of expansion. Proponents of this death-dealing cite dignity and autonomy as the goal, but it is impossible to believe that considerations of cost and devaluation of the disabled and the very sick will not drive the actions of parties who now suffer from fiscal shortfalls and declining respect for human life. Smith  summarizes  how five amendments introduced by the government in Victoria, Australia to its pioneering assisted suicide bill push for expansion in each instance.

Among them are proposals to expand the time range for a prognosis of terminal illness from six months to 12 months, creating a new group of candidates for assisted suicide, and requiring “registered health practitioners who conscientiously object to provide minimum information” about assisted suicide. Violations of conscience along these lines will facilitate suicides and, moreover, can serve to bar entry into the medical profession in the first place by practitioners who adhere to a Hippocratic standard.

The news from South America is similarly bracing. Earlier this month, Uruguay became the first nation in the region to  allow euthanasia. The terms of the law regarding who is eligible and the need for the presence of “unbearable suffering” are similar to other nations’ assisted suicide statutes, with the wrinkle that Uruguay’s does not allow death to come by self-administration. Instead, the health care professional administers the lethal dose, a condition that would seem like cold comfort from a historical perspective.

The worst abuses of vulnerable patients have  historically arisen  in the context of physicians compromising or abandoning their roles as healers and not agents of death. Chile’s left-wing president, Gabriel Baric, has reportedly renewed his campaign for assisted suicide in his majority-Catholic country. Baric has also  worked  with the Chilean Minister of Women and Gender Equity Antonia Orellana to legalize abortion in a nation where limits on the practice have been associated with  improved maternal health.

Hochul’s decision on the assisted suicide bill could come at any time. If her position on  abortion, death-dealing at the other edge of life, is any indication, it is hard to be optimistic that a veto is in the works. The election of Zohran Mamdani, who voted for the assisted suicide law as a member of the New York General Assembly, may encourage the governor to ratify the measure and make New York the 10th state in the union to approve a practice that, once enacted, expands into new territory.

At the federal level, the United States has just  soared  above $38 trillion in national debt. Assisted suicide and abortion can be construed as short-term solutions to government expenditure issues, but the truth is likely to lie in the opposite direction. The cost of medical care for people late in life is part of the natural cycle, and the resources to support it depend on people having been valued for a lifetime. The same is true of the unborn. Decisions for death compound human losses and foster attitudes that lead to even more devastation.

News reports say that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops meeting in a few weeks has no planned discussion of assisted suicide. It is hard to overlook the role that nominally Catholic politicians have played on this issue in New Jersey, California, New York, and now in Latin America. Catholic bishops have generally been  outspoken  on the matter during the months-long debate in the British Parliament, and unconfirmed accounts have appeared of King Charles  facing doubts  about giving his assent to bills that will lead to the deaths of the most vulnerable young and old in the United Kingdom.

One can only hope that these reports are true and pray that, if it comes to that and the bills are not defeated in Parliament, a king of England and religious leaders there and here will rise to the occasion and say no to this slipperiest of slopes.

Chuck Donovan served in the Reagan White House as a senior writer and as Deputy Director of Presidential Correspondence until early 1989. He was executive vice president of Family Research Council, a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation, and founder/president of Charlotte Lozier Institute from 2011 to 2024. He has written and spoken extensively on issues in life and family policy.

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