Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look and an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.

Theologian Stanley Howrowas once said that if in a hundred years Christians are known as those who do not

kill their children and do not kill their elderly, we will have done something right.

His words are especially prophetic these days in light of a post-Christian West that has in so many ways embraced killing.

For example, this month the Dutch government implemented a policy that now permits terminally

ill children up to 12 years old to be euthanized.

In other words, young children can now be put to death

without giving their own consent. Though this new policy is only supposed to apply

in exceptional cases of very serious terminal illnesses, limits on assisted suicide almost never hold.

The most obvious example to the world right now is Canada.

In 2021, 10,000 Canadians were killed by physician-assisted suicide.

That's one out of every 30 Canadian deaths.

This explosion in medically assisted deaths there

led columnist David Brooks to write in the Atlantic

that autonomy-based liberalism, the idea that we each own ourselves the in the right story after story just how quickly and easily assisted suicide can blur

into involuntary killing as many have observed the right to die has this

pernicious way of becoming a duty to die.

And this deadly logic is embraced across much of Europe on a scale that few appreciate.

Back in 2017, CBS ran a celebratory headline announcing that Iceland was on pace to

quote virtually eliminate Down syndrome. Now no cure had been found for the

condition of course. Instead what the article was referring to was that Iceland

...