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Popping the filter bubble and the sanctity of life.
This Tuesday I was presented with a piece of Trivia that brought me up short.
My initial reaction was to quite literally exclaim "bullshit!" but having looked into it, there does appear to be a case. According to the Sixth Annual Report on Medical Assistance in Dying in Canada (which is currently the most recent report available) Canadian doctors euthanized 16,499 individuals in 2024, an increase of 7.5% over the 15,343 euthanized in 2023. Meanwhile The Trace a website maintained by the Gun Control advocacy organization Everytown USA maintains that there were 14,651 instances of Homicide by Gunshot in 2025. While this number does not include self-inflicted gunshots (IE Suicides) it does include an estimated 1,200 cases where the shooting was likely justified (IE suspects being shot by police or by would-be victims) and at least 2 instances of execution by firing squad.
Upon review of those numbers and their associated trend-lines where instances of euthanasia in Canada have increased with each consecutive year since it was legalized, while homicide in the US has been trending downward for the last 5 years from it's Pandemic-era peak it actually seems likely to me that more people are killed by doctors in Canada than are killed by guns in the US. Not "per capita" but by raw quantity (16 thousand people and change versus 14 thousand and change).
Considering the above in the context of another story that came across my feed a couple weeks ago. A Ghoulish Proposal Gets a Prestige Endorsement, it seems to me that there is a concerted effort on the part of certain factions to commodify and devalue Human life. See this story from the New York Times last year Organ Donors are too Rare we Need a New Definition of Death. I expect the media to assure me that that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy announcing that the Network for Hope (an organ procurement non-profit serving Kentucky, Indiana, and Ohio) having had their certification revoked on the basis of credible claims that many donors were not legally dead at the time their organs were harvested is completely unrelated.
On a slightly different track, back when Harris was running for president there was this "ridiculous claim" that the Left wanted to legalize Abortion up to the moment of crowning, but just this Monday, Massachusetts became the 10th state in the union to do just that.
As in my prior "Popping filter bubbles" posts I don't feel like any of these things really warrant a post on their own, but when taken together they illustrate a trend, and I find myself lacking the vocabulary to describe my growing sense of unease with where this one seems to be going.
Why stop there? More Canadians are killed by cancer, heart disease, COVID, and accidents than doctors. More Americans are killed by themselves than by other people with guns. Reasoning with raw quantities is more likely to get assisted suicide expanded rather than abolished. You won’t dismantle the master’s house with his tools.
Who, exactly, do you have in mind? Doctors? Liberals?
It is a little ridiculous. Most states still have restrictions after 5 to 6 months, including California, Virginia and New York. Most states will also allow extremely late abortions…if only to save the mother’s life. Some, like Texas, have been intentionally vague about what they would and wouldn’t tolerate. Massachusetts claims that it’s rescinding its second-trimester exception specifically to help mothers in that situation. There is no insinuation that anyone involved would be happy about a D&E.
In conclusion, I think you’re overfitting the trend. Abortion laws are relatively stable now that the post-Dobbs reactions have smoothed out. They also don’t really connect to suicide or organ donor laws on the left. For the religious right, they’re all spiritual concerns, but the material facts don’t line up.
No it very manifestly is not.
We are watching mainstream Democrats pivot from "Don't be ridiculous that would never happen." to "Yes it's happening and that's a good thing." in the space of an election cycle.
I don’t find this framing to be especially persuasive since Massachusetts is apparently the 10th state to do it, and laws of the other similar states all pre-date the 2024 election. If the mainstream democratic position was “don’t be ridiculous, [passing such a law] would never happen” then they were factually wrong then, and nothing really changed in the space of an election cycle.
The steelman is that the mainstream democratic positions are actually “don’t be ridiculous, [the late-term elective abortions with zero medical reason] would never happen” and “Yes, it’s good we passed this law because it reduces the red-tape for late-term abortions for medical reasons”. These two positions are not internally contradictory.
For what it’s worth, I do not agree with this new law because I think it would actually lead to elective late-term abortions and I would prefer they kept the previous version, similar to California’s abortion laws.
Generally, from what I've seen the steelman is, "If a woman wanted to abort for purely elective reasons she would have done so earlier in the pregnancy. These laws just make doctors fear that if they perform an abortion for medical reasons (the baby or mother is extremely unlikely to survive) they'll be put on trial."
Which is one of those things that sounds plausible but not sure how true it is.
It bullshit, they have caught people going over gestational limits before. But going beyond that, most countries have gestational limits, and the idea that having them will put women in danger or make it hard for doctors makes no sense, given that fact.
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Ignoring that they could be put on trial for that more generally, of course. Everyone else has a reasonable fear that in a self-defense case this will occur anyway, and isn't that generally the justification the pro-abortion side trots out?
So the hospitals that pre-emptively prohibit the procedure are generally either just grandstanding (re: "Blues think they're the only bastion of civilization in a hostile country"), or are sunk into the tarpit of (Blue-style) extreme risk-aversion by banning the practice. Which they're incentivized to do, since this can give their side a few graves to stand on to enable the grandstanding, even though those deaths are ultimately caused by them and their power structure being insane people.
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Lying. They were lying. Ralph Northam, everyone that defended him, et cetera and so forth, all lying.
Hypocrisy is not the only offense in the world, and it's unenforceable against people who do not share one's own moral precepts.
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