England and Wales are preparing to legalize assisted suicide. The “Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill” was passed by the House of Commons in June and now moves on to the House of Lords. The bill has plenty of detractors, including the former Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May, who referred to it as the “license to kill bill.” May warned of “normalizing” suicide and of the message such a law would send to the elderly, mentally ill and disabled about the value of their lives.
[…]It isn’t just the embrace of death that threatens the West. There’s also abortion and the declining birth rate. None of the western European countries has a birth rate at the population replacement level of two children per family. The birth rate in the United States is barely at replacement level. Abortions were declining in the U.S. until 2017 but have been steadily increasing each year since, with more than 1 million abortions performed in 2023 for the first time since 2012.
And now, American society has a new obsession: chemically castrating and surgically mutilating the bodies of otherwise physically healthy young people, rendering them incapable of sexual reproduction (and, in some cases, sexual performance or pleasure).
This is madness. Western civilization is destroying its fertility and its future.
These trends are direct consequences of the West’s abandonment of Christianity, the faith that built modern Europe and which is the cornerstone of the United States of America. Christian majorities in the U.S. and in countries like France, Italy, Spain, Ireland and Canada have been ignoring the tenets of the faith, watering them down, apologizing for them, and even condemning them as “racist,” “patriarchal” and “colonialist.”
The results are predictably catastrophic. Christianity views the value of each God-given human life as inherent, immutable and immeasurable, not dependent upon the whims or wishes of any particular individual. That value has, among other achievements, driven unprecedented advances in medical care, healing, child life expectancy, longevity and the alleviation of suffering. It should not surprise us, therefore, that as Christianity is gradually eroded as a cultural foundation, humans become disposable rather than indispensable, and the value of life becomes transactional rather than transcendent; about money rather than morals.
As England prepares to join other nations that have legalized euthanasia and assisted suicide, it appears to miss the irony: If Christianity is cast aside, it will take Western civilization with it.
The West is killing itself.
— Laura Hollis, Oct. 4 WorldNetDaily column