America is developing an appetite for killing its elderly. A recent Pew Research poll suggests that comfort is growing: 63 percent of Americans now say physician-assisted death is either morally acceptable or simply not a moral issue at all. Only 35 percent call it morally wrong. The conscience is not yet gone. But it is losing ground fast.
Perhaps most jarring is the dramatic erosion of beliefs of self-ascribed Catholics. The Pew data shows majority support among my cohort: fifty-nine percent see no moral problem with physician-assisted death, even though Church teaching explicitly prohibits it. That number should trouble any Catholic paying attention. But the same poll does contain a stubborn holdout. Among Americans for whom religion is very important, nearly six in ten still call physician-assisted death morally wrong. These are not fringe positions. However, they are being told their position is extreme. It is not extreme. It is the last line of a civilizational argument that, if lost, will not easily be recovered.
Those who support euthanizing the elderly have a habit of arguing from what columnist Louise Perry called a “motte-and-bailey” position: from the easily defended high ground, they describe a terminally person in pain, surrounded by loved ones, seeking a peaceful end. But the bailey is something else. Canada is set to hit 100,000 deaths under its Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) Program by this summer, more than twice the number of Canadians who died in World War II. Among those deaths were people whose only diagnosis was depression or poverty. This is not a slippery slope argument but a description of where the slope already leads.
Now the selling begins in earnest.
The financial argument comes first: dying in America is ruinously expensive. Nursing home care runs $8,000 to $12,000 a month. Funeral costs average over $10,000. The Washington Post recently walked through the full cost of a late American life: retirement drawdown, long-term care, estate taxes, and burial. Retirement savings intended for forty years vanish in eighteen months of assisted living. The implied solution being marketed is not better coverage or more humane care. It is a shorter timeline.
Then comes the emotional argument: the agony of watching a parent decline, the exhaustion of caregiving, the loneliness of the elderly. These, too, are real. Across the country, aging parents like mine repeat the same lines with increasing frequency: that they hope to go without too much pain; that they don’t want to be a burden; that they’ve seen what caregiving did to a sibling, a neighbor, a close friend. Their grown children absorb this, often from a distance, while managing the reality of parents facing serious mental and physical decline. The exhaustion is genuine. So is the love. But the two together, in a culture that has quietly made peace with the early exit, add up to something worth fighting.
The pandemic made the underlying failure plain. Nursing home residents died alone, without a hand to hold, and the country was horrified. The right response was obvious: no one should die without someone present. Instead, the lesson drawn in too many quarters was that a faster, tidier death might spare everyone the ordeal. The answer to abandonment turned out to be more of it.
A recent episode of Anderson Cooper’s CNN podcast featured California Governor Gavin Newsom describing his mother’s death by doctor-assisted suicide, which was illegal in California at the time. His dying mother had left him a voicemail because he hadn’t been returning her calls. This was a failure to show up. The interview treated it as a prelude to something beautiful.
Newsom called the doctor who administered the lethal cocktail “an angel” who “risked everything.” He called being at her death “a gift.” A sitting governor celebrating an illegal assisted suicide on national radio is not sharing a private grief. He is making an intimate and tearful case that does more to shift public opinion than any policy paper ever could. He is also, not coincidentally, a likely future presidential candidate cultivating a national profile. The cause has found its spokesman. The pitch never changes: voluntary, patient-directed, a matter of personal choice.
Twelve states currently allow for physician-assisted suicide, with Illinois Governor JB Pritzker signing his state’s law last December. New York followed in February. The Pew poll shows why the momentum is building: 76 percent of Democrats see no moral problem with the practice. Among self-described liberals, that number hits 87 percent. The progressive left has made up its mind.
But a choice made under financial ruin, family exhaustion, or the enforced isolation of institutional care is not really a choice. It is resignation with a medical co-signature.
There is dignity in dying on God’s schedule, not on an insurance company’s or a hospital’s budget projections, or the schedule of a son too busy to return his mother’s calls. The lesson is not that she was right to spare him a natural death. It is that he should have picked up the phone.
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Andrea Picciotti-Bayer is director of the Conscience Project and recipient of the Religious Freedom Institute’s 2025 Religious Freedom Impact Award.
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