Whatever happened to medicine saving lives?

How is it that so many can claim that abortion, the intentional killing of a baby not yet born, constitutes health care? Why is euthanasia, the intentional killing of someone who would otherwise live longer, described as a “hard beauty”? It makes no sense. Not if you still believe what medicine was always supposed to believe: that doctors exist to save lives, not to end them on purpose.

Deliberately offering death as a treatment is the opposite of the medical calling. Death is not an antidote. It should never appear on the list of options when a patient is suffering, a child is diagnosed, or a family is afraid.

And yet here we are. Death isn’t merely on the list. Increasingly, it’s the first thing offered. Does the baby have a possible diagnosis? Abort. Is your mother likely to die within six months? End it now. What about the child in the Netherlands — not even two years old — whose parents were offered euthanasia because of a disability, and accepted? That child is not alive today. He or she was killed under the name of a doctor-assisted death, and the child had no power to refuse.

Two of the most egregious ways of taking life are now dressed up as mercy and health care, and they aim at the least of these. They aim at children, from those still in the womb to those barely walking. They aim at the elderly, people who have lived long and are now in pain. They aim at the 30-year-old crushed by severe depression or mental illness. In their most vulnerable hours, many of these patients cannot speak for themselves clearly — or at all.

This isn’t to say other murders are somehow less evil. All murder is an abomination, a wound in a fallen world. But there is a difference between a criminal who kills out of malice and a culture that kills in the name of compassion, insisting that the killing is a net positive.

In October 2022, 37-year-old Jennyfer Hatch was euthanized in Canada. For a decade she had lived with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a painful genetic condition. In an interview with CTV News, given under a pseudonym, she said the health care system had failed her again and again. Appointments came in what has been called a “chaotic and ineffective stream.” Even the search for real palliative care to ease her discomfort went nowhere. Eventually she resigned herself.

“It is far easier to let go than keep fighting,” she said.

Yet when she applied for Medical Aid in Dying, approval came quickly. The form specifically stated that no other treatment recommendations or interventions were suitable to her needs or to her financial constraints. In case you missed it: Jennyfer didn’t want to die. Death simply became the most available option. Even then, her friend Tama Recker told CTV that part of what Jennyfer wanted was to get people talking about a health care system she understood to be “very broken.”

There is a real sense in which health care, abroad and at home, is deeply flawed. My own father is a medical professional, and he would agree. But what is supposed to make medicine great is not only the drugs and the technology. It’s the people who enter the field because they want to heal, because they want to do good to the person in front of them.

In part, the system is flawed because it’s full of flawed people. There are good doctors — men and women who genuinely want to serve, not merely collect a paycheck. There are also, increasingly, people in medicine simply to advance an agenda.

I recently heard a physician say that medical professionals should be nearly immune to outside pressure, fixed on the science and on the patient’s good. The moment ideology takes the lead, death follows — sometimes of the body, sometimes of the soul.

That is what is happening with euthanasia. Look at Jennyfer and at the many others who were not so much freely choosing death as being steered toward it. It’s happening with abortion. How many children would be alive if a doctor hadn’t been the first to offer abortion as the “answer” to a disorder or an abnormality? It’s happening in the transgender experiment, where children and adults have been left with lifelong damage from drugs and surgeries performed on otherwise healthy bodies.

And what motivates all of this isn’t only fallen human nature, but the enemy himself. Scripture warns that he masquerades as an angel of light. His most effective move is not to announce the lie. It’s to dress the toxin up until it looks like the cure. His work advances fastest when the evil he offers appears to be good — a tactic Scripture is swift to condemn (Isaiah 5:20).

So assisted suicide becomes “mercy killing.” Murdering a child in the womb becomes “health care.” Removing healthy body parts is suddenly “becoming the real you” — freedom, identity, progress. It’s no accident that some of the most anti-biblical ideas arrive under the label “progressive.” The enemy needs to convince people that they’re progressing, even as they give way to the active detriment of society itself, starting with the weak.

Everything good, true, and beautiful comes from Christ. Satan wants nothing more than to steal, kill, and destroy those things. And so, we shouldn’t be surprised that the enemy has set his sights on an institution meant to serve the least of these. We also mustn’t lose heart. Christ is still on the throne, and last I checked, He has no intention of relinquishing it.

Yet in mourning over the gradual loss of a medical world that served to save lives, we would be remiss not to look to the hope of the One who will forever save souls. In a world of broken systems and ill-willed actors, Christ remains faithful, gracious, merciful, and utterly good. He isn’t merely a God of love. He is love. And He is the same yesterday, today, and forever. We can rest easy knowing that those who call upon the name of the Lord will never be put to shame, nor will their labor be in vain.

We should lament what is broken. We should oppose evil that wears the costume of good. We should speak plainly against the romanticizing of euthanasia, the commonality of abortion, and the medicalization of gender confusion. We should insist that medicine return to its first work: saving lives, not ending or unmaking them. And we should not grow weary in that work.

The call hasn’t changed. Medicine is still meant to heal. The culture may rename death and call it care, but a lie doesn’t become true because it’s repeated in a clinic. Our answer isn’t despair. It’s clearer speech, steadier courage, and a refusal to confuse the destroyer with the Physician — trusting that the God who saves souls has not abandoned those in the world He sent His one and only Son to redeem.