By a vote of 330 to 275, the United Kingdom's Parliament voted to support assisted death for the "terminally ill" in England and Wales. Whatever platitudes supporters bring out in favor of the support, in a government-run healthcare system, this is the state-supported death of those its doctors deem terminal. People at the most vulnerable end of the spectrum will be offered suicide by a state tasked with allegedly healing them.

There's no going back from this moment for the United Kingdom or the West. When a so-called liberal democracy takes over the entire healthcare system and then starts making life-or-death decisions for those in the most vulnerable position of its care, it's a Rubicon moment. All calls that this is limited and meant to help those most vulnerable can be flatly rejected by real-world data.

As Ramesh Ponnuru points out in The Washington Post, Canada's assisted suicide legislation went from limited use in 2016, similar to what UK lawmakers say here, and has expanded so rapidly. It went from something that was supposed to be only for the terminally ill to now it is the fifth-leading cause of death in Canada.

Canada's M.A.I.D. is the stuff of dystopian nightmares when those with mental illnesses or competing in things like the Paralympics are now pointed to death's door. Canada got there in just a few years. The United Kingdom is lying to itself if it believes this will be limited legislation. Death's loudest proponents want the state to exercise life-and-death powers over everyone with a broad mandate.

In truth, this should make sense. When you turn your entire healthcare system over to the government, and those costs skyrocket, the state must lower costs to survive. In the American system, we still retain the hope and ideal of pursuing new cures, fresh opinions, and emptying every cash barrel possible for the sole idea of healing the sick, tending to the injured, and bringing the mentally ill to wholeness.

Government-run systems are a bottom-line counting exercise. They point to taxpayers, decreasing revenue, and find the last out: killing off the problem: patients.

States cannot pursue both the ideals of life and death. Canada's government-run system tries to maintain a suicide-prevention hotline while at the same time building an express lane for everyone else. It's an absurdity on its face. You cannot tell people to choose life when you've legislated death and put the power of the state behind it.

We are in the midst of a medical revolution. Our advancements in the past hundred years have eradicated diseases, viruses, and more that would have been a death notice for any previous generation. We answered the COVID-19 pandemic with Trump's Operation Warp Speed, which neutered a lab-made virus from China specifically designed to kill humans. In any previous generation, this would have wiped out even more people.

We are challenging the upper limits of human mortality and attacking every disease known to mankind. And this is the moment the death caucus seeks to stop progress. State-sponsored assisted suicide is the ultimate form of nihilism; declaring the end is the only possible path.

What's worse is that this is targeted at those a properly built government is designed to help. We are tasked with defending the sick, infirm, widows and orphans, and those unable to lift a finger for themselves. In its initial form, government-run healthcare at least understands this point by trying to treat everyone and putting the cost burden on everyone.

Instead, the so-called leading progressives of our day are pushing that to the side and opening the door to death itself on these vulnerable groups. Predators arrived to attack the vulnerable, and the gatekeepers let the wolves in, calling them saviors.

A society cannot last long that kills off its most vulnerable. It can't do that because it winds up being Nazism in reverse. The state is chasing death at both ends of life: we're aborting children with "defects," and killing off anyone who develops defects later on. This is an untenable position and brings back all the cruelty of the eugenics movement.

But more importantly, a state actively killing off the most vulnerable invites the judgment of God Himself and has earned that judgment. Thomas Jefferson once remarked on slavery, "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever."

Canada is laughing at that while building more excuses to kill off more of its population. The United Kingdom wants the same thing. They dare God to sleep while they target the most vulnerable. Canada has earned that judgment, and the United Kingdom wants to join them. 

The United States should lock the doors to this menace and never allow it to enter the country. We will lose ourselves if we do, and there is no return.