There has been a dangerous shift in medicine over the years. Priorities have moved from curing disease to managing death. Those of us of a certain age can well remember watching television shows and movies depicting doctors and nurses doing everything possible to save lives. Until relatively recent times, this is how the medical profession was seen. Even amid the Covid onslaught, medical professionals were viewed as heroes who put their own health at risk to treat the critically ill.

Yet an increasing number of medical professionals have moved to de-emphasize heroic measures to save lives in favor of advocacy for physician-assisted suicide. This progression started with the hospice movement, which has a profound influence on medical education: Reversing the logical order of training, today’s medical students learn first about “goals of care” before they learn the basics of curative medicine. Indeed, hospital admission orders for an ill patient cannot be entered in a hospital computer system without a discussion of the patient’s “code status” — a troubling concentration on “end of life” concerns in lieu of focusing on the patient’s actual condition, and how it can be fixed.

The pro-life movement advocates for a continuum, proclaiming sanctity “from conception to natural death.” The Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision ended the idea — established in the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton rulings — that there is a constitutional right to kill your unborn child. Since the Supreme Court has taken this issue away from the federal government, a number of states have already moved to put limits on abortion.

Unfortunately, that same movement is losing ground when it comes to protecting the lives of the elderly and infirm.

Physician-assisted suicide, or euthanasia, has been gaining momentum — legally, legislatively, and culturally — in alarming ways. There are eleven states, and the District of Columbia, where physicians are empowered to give lethal doses of medication to their patients who would like to die. In Connecticut, where I live, this practice is still illegal, but there have been multiple attempts to pass legislation that would allow this to happen.

A sense of the inevitable pervades. And why shouldn’t it, given the reality of creeping euthanasia that a practicing general physician — as I am — cannot avoid. I will share an example. About 15 years ago, I received a call from the chief of the medical staff at my hospital to discuss why I was rude to a member of the hospital’s ethics committee. The situation was surreal, but not uncommon.

The patient at the center of this story had been under my care for many years. She had a history of vascular disease and had lost portions of both her legs. She was confined to a motorized wheelchair and lived in a nursing home. Even though she was disabled, she was able to get out with her family and attend church, and she enjoyed going to bingo.

My patient developed pneumonia and was admitted to the hospital but needed to be transferred to the intensive care unit. This is the point where the medical residents gave up on her.

The residents from the ICU, who had known the patient for all of 20 minutes at this time, called the patient’s daughter to tell her that her mother couldn’t get better, that she had no quality of life, and that she should be kept comfortable rather than be treated in the ICU.

This behavior has become standard operating procedure for many health-care providers. Families of patients who are critically ill or have other disabilities are routinely pressured to withdraw care. Doctors know best, right? The pressure on families to limit patients’ care to “comfort” measures can be intense.

I was rude in arguing against this death wish for my patient, and for proper medical treatment that had as its goal her being remedied, not dead. My patient returned to her prior state of health and lived for a number of years after that episode.

The origins of medical “comfort” are noble, important, and, for me, local. It was in 1963 when Florence Wald, the dean of the Yale School of Nursing, attended a lecture by English physician Dr. Cicely Saunders about hospice care. She was so motivated by this lecture — given in New Haven, Conn. — that three years later, Wald left her job as dean and started the hospice movement in the United States. She would help to open the first hospice facility in nearby Branford, Conn.

Another important event happened in 1969, when Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross released her book On Death and Dying. This is the famous work that describes the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Her focus on acceptance of death led her to become an advocate for and promoter of the hospice movement. Kübler-Ross did believe in an afterlife and was a strong opponent of physician-assisted suicide.

The cultural push to make mercy killing into a virtue was sparked in 1980 amid the founding of the Hemlock Society by Derek Humphry and his wife, Ann Wickett Humphry. They argued that hospice did not go far enough and openly advocated for physician-assisted suicide. To promote this position, Derek Humphrey wrote the book Final Exit: The Practicalities of Self-Deliverance and Assisted Suicide for the Dying. The book is a veritable guide on how to kill yourself or others.

The Hemlock Society has rebranded itself several times and has adopted the Orwellian name of Compassion and Choices. This is the group that is currently advocating legislation, state by state, to allow physician-assisted suicide across the country.

The concept of hospice was originally sold to the public as a better way to treat patients with terminal cancer who could not be helped with further medical treatments (the Catholic-run Calvary Hospital in the Bronx is a famous example of this cancer-care mission). That mission has been hijacked and turned on its head. Hospice care is now offered to patients with chronic pain and dementia and the elderly who are otherwise displaying a failure to thrive. The standard treatment is the same: high doses of narcotics, no artificial fluids or nutrition, and inevitable death.

In 2008, I created a small firestorm in my local medical community when I wrote an opinion piece for the New Haven Register calling hospice “abortion for the elderly.” They may not like the term, but when you take a patient with dementia and “terminally sedate” them, that is what it is.

The problem extends beyond hospice care. Palliative care consults in hospitals can offer the same problematic treatment plans for patients. A 2022 study by Suzanne Dickerson et al. published in the International Journal of Qualitative Studies on Health and Well-being found that there was no standard for Comfort Measures Only (CMO) orders. They also found that while CMO orders can mean different things, the most common interpretation of them was: no medical treatments, no artificial nutrition, and a morphine drip. The study’s most troubling finding was that morphine drips were often used for CMO patients who were not in pain.

To be clear, hospice officially opposes physician-assisted suicide. But the movement’s founder, Florence Wald, drifted from the stand. This appeared in the November 14, 2008, edition of the L.A. Times:

Wald also came out in support of euthanasia. “There are cases in which either the pain or the debilitation the patient is experiencing is more than can be borne, whether it be economically, physically, emotionally or socially,” she said. “For this reason, I feel a range of options should be available to the patient, and this should include assisted suicide.”

Wald’s inclusion of economics as a reason for euthanasia is quite telling.

Economics is a leading reason that the political left embraces both abortion and euthanasia. The welfare state is expensive. It has also been proven to be unsustainable time and again. One way to cut costs is to eliminate the burden of unwanted children and the sick. Obamacare has caused the cost of insurance to skyrocket in part because of the excessive promises in the program. The consequence is that insurance companies are no longer allowed to discriminate against preexisting conditions. The result is that a person can be diagnosed with a serious illness and then get insurance as long as they sign up during the open enrollment period.

Arguably, the greatest accomplishment of the pro-life movement is that it has changed the way the public and physicians view abortion. According to a report from the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute, “Only 7 percent of U.S. obstetrician-gynecologists who work in private practice settings provided abortions in 2013 or 2014.” This would suggest that a majority of ob-gyns have the moral clarity to protect life.

On the other end of the spectrum of conception to natural death, we need to bring this same moral clarity to the rest of the medical profession — or we will face a very troubling future.

Bill Clinton used to like to say that “abortion should be safe, legal and rare.” We can question for whom abortion is safe (certainly not the unborn child), but the term rare is also misleading. In the United States, there are between 600,000 and 1 million abortions per year, depending on what reports you believe. Even if you go with the lower number, 1,600 abortions a day is not a rare event.

If we go down the dark path of broadly allowing physician-assisted suicide, it, too, will be neither “safe” nor “rare.” A National Review article by Wesley Smith noted that since medical aid in dying became legal in Canada, it is now the fifth-leading cause of death beyond our northern border.

Advocates for physician-assisted suicide have been eroding the sanctity of life for years. From the hospice movement to the expansion of “palliative” care, the respect for life is in decline. If we don’t have a pro-life movement that vigorously includes the sick and the elderly, health care in the United States will face a bleak future. If abortion is wrong for the unborn, its geriatric version is wrong for the infirm and the old.

We cannot let the left pay for their socialist dreams at the expense of our most vulnerable. We must stand for life.