Killing Off The Elderly To Save Money
by Don Feder
New York could become the 12th state to legalize “mercy” killing, if Gov. Kathy Hochul signs a bill that passed the state Legislature in June. In Britain, similar legislation has passed both houses of Parliament.
Liberals who support abortion, which was also initially sold as compassionate, now have set their sights on seniors.
Opponents of assisted suicide include disability activists. That they feel vulnerable is revealing. They know that voluntary could become compulsory.
The real danger in assisted suicide lies in declining fertility and the graying of society.
The U.S. fertility rate, the number of children the average woman will have in her lifetime, is 1.66, well below the 2.1 rate needed to replace current population.
This has resulted in a rapidly aging society. The number of Americans 65 and older will rise from 17% of the total population in 2022 to 23% in 2050. Schools are turned into senior centers, and adult diapers outsell baby diapers.
Other nations are aging even faster. With a fertility rate of 1.18, China’s population declined by 850,000 in 2022. Japan’s fertility rate is 1.15.
Japan’s 65 and older population is 29% of the total population, the largest in the world. Policymakers are frantic about finding a way out of this demographic nightmare. Yusuke Narita, a Japanese professor at Yale, thinks he has the answer.
“I feel like the only solution is pretty clear… Mass suicide and mass ‘seppuku’ of the elderly,” Mr. Narita casually commented in 2021. With “the possibility of making it mandatory in the future.”
“Older people are receiving too much pension money and the young people are supporting all the old people,” said a leading member of the Japanese Diet.
In the United States, public expenditures for seniors are huge budget items.
Social Security costs $1.5 trillion annually, 22.4% of the total federal budget. Absent major reform, the trust fund will be depleted by 2034. Medicare cost $839 billion in 2024, more than half of all mandatory federal spending on health programs and services.
The demographic crisis would not be so severe if we hadn’t aborted 63 million children since 1973. Baby boomers who thought women had a right to choose death for their unborn children may soon be confronting a death sentence of their own.
The Rev. Shenan J. Boquet, president of Human Life International, warns: “Having been so successful in preventing and killing human life at the beginning of life, the culture of death is now turning its attention to the end of life.”
There is a lethal logic here. If inconvenient lives are expendable at one end of the spectrum (the preborn), why not at the other (the elderly)?
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2025/jul/13/americas-fertility-crisis-makes-assisted-suicide-slippery-slope/
Unread something a while back that said Canada is already doing this and in many cases the target is not given a choice
My grandmother was placed in hospice, so I would like to say that this is already happening to an extent. Once on hospice they started pumping her full of fentanyl, essentially. It was something she didn't react well to and so their insistence that she had it made no sense in the way of “comfort care”. (I don't react well to morphine, myself, so I was unsurprised by her screaming that she was on fire from the drugs.) They said she'd be dead within the week.
At the time, and I don't know if it has changed, there was some incentive to have the patient die quickly, as I understand, because insurance paid a lump sum up front (rather than over time) for a dying person. The result being that the company gets more money for less work if a person dies faster.
We switched her to a palliative care situation with a Catholic service in our area (pro-life isn't just for those on the way in, it is also for those on the way out). She lived a year on palliative care through the pro-life Catholic service -- far more than a week. She also didn't depart this life drugged out of her mind.
Patient, beware of hospice. If you need that kind of care, seek out a pro-life or Catholic-aligned palliative care group. They should at least have some directives in place to avoid the “mercy” killing route.