The line keeps moving

Benjamin Franklin once famously observed that in this world, “nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” Today, we might add a third certainty: Once assisted suicide is legalized, it expands. Recent statistics from Australia and Canada paint a sobering picture of Western society’s increasing embrace of assisted death.

In the Australian state of Victoria, the number of assisted deaths has nearly quadrupled since the practice was introduced in 2019. It rose from 129 deaths in 2019-20 to 512 in 2025-26. Just in the past year, Victoria saw 1,156 applications for assisted dying, a nearly 40 percent increase from 2024-25 and the highest number since the program began. Applications have increased by an average of approximately 20 percent per year.

Yet rather than regarding this growth as a reason for caution, the state government is expanding access. In April 2027, new laws will extend the prognosis requirement from six to 12 months for most conditions, reduce the minimum waiting period from nine days to five, and allow healthcare professionals to initiate conversations about assisted dying. Additional changes eliminate a specialist assessment required in certain cases, expand who may administer lethal drugs, and require conscientious objectors to direct patients toward participating providers.

Remarkably, Victoria’s Voluntary Assisted Dying Review Board does not report these developments with alarm. Rather, it celebrates them in its latest report. The board says the changes will make assisted dying “more accessible” and predicts further growth once they take effect.

Canada offers another sobering example. Since the country legalized Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) in 2016, its use has grown dramatically. Through 2024, 76,475 Canadians had died via MAID. One recent story estimates the cumulative number has since surpassed 100,000.

And those numbers are likely to grow as eligibility expands. Initially, a person’s natural death had to be considered “reasonably foreseeable,” but Parliament eliminated that requirement in 2021.

These developments raise an important question: How do societies that pride themselves on compassion come to regard deliberately ending a patient’s life as health care? Part of the answer lies in the West’s diminishing understanding of human dignity.

A biblical worldview grounds human dignity in what a person is, not in what a person can do. Human beings possess value because they are created in God’s image. Dignity is therefore inherent. It does not increase with intelligence, health, or usefulness, nor does it diminish with age, dependence, or suffering.

Increasingly, however, Western societies have embraced a different anthropology. Often called “personhood theory,” this prevailing view ties human dignity not to being human but to certain abilities, such as self-awareness, cognition, and independence. The result is a hierarchy in which some lives are valued more than others. By elevating personal autonomy as a defining measure of personhood, this view makes the logic of assisted suicide difficult to contain.

This is why Australia and Canada should command our attention. Assisted suicide is introduced as an extraordinary measure for adults experiencing unbearable suffering near the end of life. Safeguards are promised, eligibility is restricted, and critics are assured that slippery slope concerns are unfounded. But it does not take long for restrictions once presented as safeguards to be recast as barriers. A 12-month prognosis becomes six. A nine-day waiting period becomes five. An additional specialist assessment disappears.

This points to another problem: Assisted suicide fundamentally alters the purpose of medicine. For centuries, the physician’s vocation has been oriented toward healing when possible, relieving suffering, and caring for patients when healing is no longer possible. Assisted suicide introduces a radically different principle: instead of caring for the patient, the doctor facilitates the patient’s death.

Additionally, for Christians, government-facilitated assisted suicide is incompatible with a biblical understanding of government. Romans 13 describes government as God’s servant “for your good.” Civil authority exists to protect life, punish wrongdoing, and promote human flourishing. A government that organizes and facilitates the intentional deaths of vulnerable citizens has strayed from its God-ordained purpose.

As the experiences of Australia and Canada demonstrate, once a society accepts the premise that intentionally ending a person’s life is a legitimate form of medicine, it becomes increasingly difficult to explain why the practice should be offered to one class of patients and denied to others. The logic expands because autonomy itself provides no obvious limiting principle.

Americans should pay attention. Medical aid in dying is now legal in 13 states and Washington, D.C. In 2026 alone, new laws took effect in Delaware, New York, and Illinois.

Christians must be clear about what is at stake. God, not the state, is the author of life. Human dignity does not depend on health, usefulness, or freedom from suffering. Australia and Canada offer a warning: Today’s promised safeguards become tomorrow’s barriers. History has repeatedly shown that once the culture of death takes root, it does not remain within its original boundaries.

The line keeps moving. Christians must refuse to move with it.