Mr. Eugenides visits New York

Imagine receiving a text from your blind and diabetic son who suffers from depression, telling you that he scheduled an appointment with a doctor to end his own life the next day.

This happened to Margaret Marsilla, whose son Kiano Vafaeian was approved to die at age 26 under a Canadian law allowing physicians to euthanize terminally ill patients. “Disgusting at every level,” Ms. Marsilla called his December 2025 death, believing that doctors took advantage of her son’s depression and decrying it as “a failure of ethics, accountability, and humanity.”

Ms. Marsilla’s experience exposes a stark tension between the promise and reality of euthanasia laws and their underlying justifications.

New York’s Medical Aid in Dying Act, recently passed by the New York Legislature and scheduled to go into effect this year, has been marketed as a triumph of mercy and an overdue recognition of dignity and choice at the end of life. Its advocates speak tirelessly of compassion and autonomy.

Beneath the therapeutic language of “choice” and “dignity,” the law fundamentally misrepresents compassion and steers public morality toward a utilitarian logic that treats human beings as problems to be managed, or worse, eliminated. This is not progress, but systemic cultural failure.

Assisted-suicide regimes rest on a simple but toxic premise: that some lives, under certain conditions, are no longer worth living. Once the state accepts that premise, it crosses a moral threshold from which retreat becomes nearly impossible.

The central question quietly shifts from how we care for the suffering to whether their continued existence justifies the emotional, financial, or social cost of keeping them alive.

That shift is the real danger of New York’s law. It does not merely expand individual choice but reframes our understanding of personhood itself.

Saint John Paul II warned explicitly against this way of thinking in Evangelium Vitae, in which he rejected any system that measures human worth by utility or autonomy. He stated that life is “a sacred reality entrusted to us, to be preserved with a sense of responsibility.” Human life, he insisted, is always a good in itself and never a means or burden. Life is never disposable, even when it is a challenge.

Cardinal Timothy Dolan has echoed this teaching repeatedly in opposing assisted suicide. He has called it “a terrible idea,” not because suffering should be ignored, but because intentionally ending an innocent human life can never be an act of care. In opposing the legislation, he warned that New York was placing itself against longstanding moral and historical norms.

Moreover, the distinction between mercy and killing is significant. There is a moral difference between allowing death to occur naturally while providing comfort and actively causing death.

The former affirms the dignity of the person even in weakness; the latter treats death as a solution to a problem. When the law collapses that distinction, medicine itself is transformed by turning physicians from caregivers bound by an oath to heal into agents of death. It is a corruption of the practice of medicine, argues ethicist Ryan T. Anderson, and a policy that disrupts the doctor-patient relationship.

Defenders of the law insist that safeguards will prevent abuse. Common sense counsels that this is untrue, as laws with narrow intentions often result in normalizing what once seemed unthinkable. What is presented as exceptional quickly becomes routine.

Experience confirms this fear. In Europe, where euthanasia and assisted-suicide regimes have existed for decades, the pattern is unmistakable: eligibility expands while oversight erodes, and exceptions become norms. What begins with terminal illness extends to chronic conditions, psychiatric suffering, dementia, and even simple distress.

In the case of Mr. Vafaeian, he was not even terminally ill.

The Netherlands and Belgium are frequently cited as models of carefully regulated euthanasia, yet both countries have steadily broadened criteria, including cases involving depression and dementia.

Belgium now even permits euthanasia for children. In the Netherlands, specialist mobile doctors will travel to patients whose own physicians refuse to participate for the bargain price of 180 euros.

These outcomes are not anomalies. They are the logical result of a system that measures human worth primarily by autonomy and suffering. Once death is framed as a benefit, pressure to expand access becomes powerful.

New York’s law enters this same moral current. It assumes autonomy is absolute, safeguards are sufficient, and culture is irrelevant. But culture always matters because it shapes expectations and unspoken norms. When the state authorizes assisted suicide, it sends a message to the elderly, the depressed, the disabled, and the chronically ill that their lives are conditional. That they are liabilities rather than human persons worthy of care and compassion.

Disability-rights advocates have long warned of this danger. In a healthcare system strained by cost pressures and bureaucratic incentives, the offer of death can quietly become an expectation. Dependence is reframed as indignity, while needing care becomes a reason to simply disappear.

This is the logic Pope Francis condemned as the “throwaway culture,” one that discards what is weak or inconvenient. Every life is sacred, Francis insisted, because “every person is willed by God.” A culture that decides which lives are worth sustaining inevitably chooses efficiency over love, power over responsibility.

That temptation is not new. Leo XIII confronted it directly in Rerum Novarum, rejecting the idea that man exists primarily as an economic unit. Labor, he argued, is not a commodity because the laborer is a person. Human beings cannot be reduced to productivity or efficiency without inflicting grave injustice. “Man precedes the state,” Leo wrote, and possesses a dignity that no economic calculus can erase.

Utilitarianism thrives in precisely the environment New York’s law creates. It promises efficiency and control. It asks what reduces suffering at the lowest cost, while ignoring that human beings are not simply variables in an equation. A society that forgets this will become increasingly efficient in its brutality.

What makes this moment particularly troubling is the broader climate of dehumanization in American life. Political opponents are reduced to caricatures, and the unborn are dismissed as inconveniences. The elderly are isolated, and loneliness has become a public-health crisis. Into this landscape, New York now introduces a law that quietly affirms that some lives are expendable.

This is why assisted suicide cannot be treated as a narrow medical issue. It reflects a far deeper moral disorder.

The Catholic moral tradition, echoed by many secular critics, rejects this logic not out of sentimentality but realism. Human dignity is not earned through independence, productivity, or comfort. It is intrinsic. As John Paul II emphasized, it does not vanish when we become weak or dependent, or when the costs of care become a heavy burden. A just society does not eliminate those who suffer; rather, it accompanies them and shares in their suffering.

Cardinal Dolan has argued that accompaniment requires meaningful investment in palliative care, hospice services, family support, and genuine human presence. It requires patience and love. Assisted suicide offers the easier path, sparing institutions and families the demanding work of continued and often emotionally draining care. That is precisely why it is so dangerous.

“A society will be judged on the basis of how it treats its weakest members,” John Paul II reminds us. By that measure, New York’s Medical Aid in Dying Act marks a tragic step backward.

The law tells the sick that their lives are negotiable, while it tells doctors that killing can be medicine. And it tells society that the death of people in despair, under the right conditions, is a compassionate solution.

This is not compassion. It is a refined form of cruelty embraced proudly by a culture that, suffering from deep alienation and isolation, no longer knows how to suffer together.

Like Mr. Eugenides, T. S. Eliot’s unsettling figure from The Wasteland, we increasingly inhabit a culture motivated by utility, transaction, and material comfort, willing to sacrifice the weak so that life may proceed without inconvenience.

If American politics is to recover a humane moral language, it must begin by rejecting laws that reduce persons to problems and dignity to economic efficiency. Otherwise, we will continue down the path Europe and Canada have already paved, where mercy is redefined as death, and barbarism is met not with violence, but open arms.