Euthanasia in Canada. Disability-selective abortion in Iceland and Denmark. Physician-assisted suicide in California. A senate candidate posing at Dachau. Kevin Finn, writing in American Thinker, argues that these scattered developments are not separate stories but symptoms of a single cultural shift — one he says treats dependency as reason enough to end a life.
Finn opens with a wildlife documentary, where wolves and coyotes target the young, old and infirm in a herd. It is a familiar nature-documentary observation, but Finn uses it as a framing device: he wonders aloud whether something comparable is happening to the unborn, the elderly and the seriously ill in the modern West. The essay’s central claim is that a society which begins to regard a human being’s usefulness as the measure of their right to live will eventually stop seeing certain people as people at all.
Canada as the model case
Much of the piece focuses on Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) program, which Finn calls the leading example of euthanasia’s expansion. He cites roughly 90,000 deaths through the program since legalization, with approximately 16,500 in 2024 alone — about five percent of all Canadian deaths that year. American Thinker’s framing treats those numbers as evidence that what began as a narrow exception for terminal illness has become something far broader.
The essay pairs the statistics with individual cases it says explain the controversy better than any aggregate figure. One is Brigitte Stegemann, an 83-year-old Ontario grandmother. According to her family, Stegemann was confused on the morning of the procedure, failed a cognitive assessment, wept, prayed, and pleaded not to receive what relatives described as “the death shot.” Practitioners have maintained that legal consent was obtained; the episode nevertheless was serious enough to prompt a police investigation.
The second case involves Christine Gauthiers, a Paralympian and Canadian veteran who contacted Veterans Affairs seeking a wheelchair lift for her home. Gauthier later reported that she was offered information about MAiD instead. She filed suit and testified before Parliament, and government officials condemned the suggestion and ordered reviews of the practice.
Finn’s argument here rests less on the number of such incidents than on what they reveal about institutional instincts — the idea that a veteran asking for accessibility equipment might be answered with an offer of death.
The American picture
Turning south, the essay notes that at least 14,446 Americans have died through physician-assisted suicide programs, with deaths rising sharply between 2014 and 2024. California alone accounts for more than 5,000 deaths over the past decade and became the first state to exceed 1,000 in a single year. According to the piece, approvals have been granted for conditions including lupus, anorexia, and complications from falls, alongside a growing and vaguely defined “other” category.
Oversight, Finn writes, remains uneven — some jurisdictions release incomplete data, while others publish no annual reports at all. He points to reported cases involving non-terminal conditions such as broken hips, diabetes and depression, and asks whether a system designed for people suffering intolerably has begun to treat dependency itself as grounds for death rather than a reason for care.
Finn also cites the Hyde Amendment, which has long barred most federal taxpayer funding of elective abortions, and notes that some estimates credit it with preventing more than two million abortions. He describes it as one of the most significant restrictions on public abortion funding despite continued political opposition.
Down syndrome and the question of eugenics
The essay extends its argument to prenatal testing. In Iceland, Finn reports, nearly 100 percent of pregnancies diagnosed with Down syndrome are terminated, with only two or three children with the condition born each year. Denmark reports about 98 percent, Britain around 90 percent, and estimates for Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States range from 67 to 90 percent.
He relays the experience of Jan and Lene Robertsen, a Norwegian couple who learned their unborn daughter had Down syndrome. According to their account, their physician immediately recommended abortion. The couple refused, describing the encounter as shocking and morally wrong, and Finn notes that other Norwegian families have reported similar pressure. Disability advocates, he adds, argue that counseling often dwells on the difficulties of raising a disabled child while downplaying the joys and ordinary experiences many people with Down syndrome have. Finn asks whether this pattern begins to resemble a modern form of eugenics.
His explanation for why this is happening now is demographic and economic: below-replacement fertility, aging populations and rising long-term care costs, set against cultural messaging that prizes youth, autonomy and productivity. Taken together, he suggests, abortion in some cases and euthanasia in others could become ways of avoiding the costs of long-term dependency.
The piece also notes that Pope Leo XIV, during a visit to France, publicly criticized that country’s assisted-dying policies — an apparent attempt to show that the concern crosses borders and institutions.
A widening net
Finn’s essay does not stop at medical questions. He argues that the same logic eroding the value of dependent life is also visible in political rhetoric that flirts with violence. He cites North Carolina Senate candidate Shelly Headen, who, posing in front of crematorium ovens at Dachau, said, “This is where Trump supporters belong.”
He also brings up comedian Bill Burr, who suggested healthcare executives should examine the policies that inspired Luigi Mangione rather than simply adding security. Attorney Rafael Mangual, identified as the Nick Ohnell Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, responded that the only way to understand the comments is as an endorsement of “brutal and extrajudicial violence as a legitimate means of expressing one’s frustrations with corporate behavior.”
Finn adds commentary from Hasan Piker, who has called for a Chinese-style cultural revolution against moderate Democrats — critics say such rhetoric favors ideological struggle over democratic persuasion — and cites a recent poll finding that nearly one-third of Democrats wished President Trump had been assassinated.
The essay’s through-line is that all of these phenomena belong to a single “culture of death,” a phrase Finn links to the older term “life unworthy of life.” The logic is associative rather than strictly causal: a society willing to end the lives of the unborn and the ill, he suggests, becomes a society whose public culture slowly loosens its grip on the sanctity of life everywhere else.
There are reasonable objections to the synthesis. The Canadian cases, the abortion statistics and the political rhetoric operate in distinct legal and moral universes, and drawing a direct line between them requires an argument Finn makes largely by juxtaposition. He acknowledges that compassion for suffering is important — the danger, in his account, is when dependency stops being something a society addresses with care and starts being something it believes can be resolved by ending a life.
The essay closes with a call for resistance: a humane society, Finn writes, should reject that trajectory. Whatever one makes of the causal chain he proposes, the individual facts he assembles — the Canadian deaths, the Dutch and Icelandic termination rates, the California numbers, the Dachau photograph — are not in dispute. What is in dispute is what they mean when placed side by side, and whether a society that keeps having to debate the value of dependent lives has already answered the question in ways it has not yet admitted.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/09/a-modern-culling/