“The first rule of medicine is to do no harm,” Alexander Raikin writes in the new cover story of National Review magazine. “The second rule in countries that have legalized death care is that the first rule doesn’t matter anymore.”
In “The End of Medicine,” Raikin explains that “the introduction of death care — in each state of Australia; in Canada, Belgium, and the Netherlands; recently in Spain and soon in France; and in ten states and counting across the United States — was meant to provide another treatment option in end-of-life care, another tool for use by physicians and their patients.”
But something deeply disturbing has occurred. “At the core of death care is the presumption that safeguards work and that consent, the most important safeguard, prevents death care from slipping into rampant homicide or suicide contagion. Instead, it is turning into the end of medicine.”
It’s easy to see where this leads. “In Belgium last year,” Raikin reports, “after a lethal injection failed to kill a 36-year-old woman with terminal cancer, the presiding physician smothered her with a pillow. In New Zealand and Canada, suicidal patients seeking medical care for suicide prevention were prompted to consider assisted suicide instead.”
As horrible as these stories are, however, there’s no need to rely on anecdote to track the devastating effects of this supposed policy of compassion.
Elsewhere, in every jurisdiction, the number of deaths at the hands of physicians or nurses is ballooning as safeguards are rescinded. Nearly a decade ago, the rapid increase of hastened deaths led a Dutch regulator in charge of oversight to plead for other countries to drop their plans for legalization. Too few listened. In California, the number of assisted suicides last year increased by more than 63 percent. In Canada, the number of deaths by euthanasia is on track to increase more than 13-fold in just the first seven years of the practice’s legalization. Belgium has seen a more than twelvefold increase since 2003. In Switzerland, which legalized assisted suicide in 1941, the number of such suicides has doubled every five years since 1999.
Read all of Raikin’s essay here. And you can find all of the new October 2, 2023, issue of National Review here. Inside it, you’ll find:
- John McCormack’s profile of Vivek Ramaswamy, “Ambition to Spare“
- Dominic Pino’s view, in “Politicians Are Keeping Their Debt Promises,” on what’s driving the gigantic deficit projections
- Michael Brendan Dougherty’s important reevaluation of the war on drugs
- And Cole Aronson’s report on what the war in Ukraine can teach American conservatives
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