The Myth of a Safe Assisted Suicide Regime.

Alexander Raikin

Alexander Raikin was published by the Wall Street Journal on December 23, 2025 in response to a December 17 letter by Corinne Carey celebrating New York Governor Hochul's decision to sign the New York assisted suicide bill into law. 

Raikin is a visiting fellow in Bioethics at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, who has been published by multiple journals news agencies. Raikin writes.

How humane is assisted suicide? Corinne Carey, from the advocacy group Compassion & Choices, suggests the answer is very (Letters, Dec. 17). New York’s bill places the decision only with a mentally competent patient, and “safeguards are in place to ensure that those who don’t qualify—say, those with eating disorders or psychiatric conditions—couldn’t receive it.”

No need to fear? Not quite.

That’s the same promise Compassion & Choices made in other states before legalization. Three years ago, the organization’s then chief legal advocacy officer—recently promoted to CEO—promised that Colorado’s legislation “does not and was never intended to apply to a person whose only diagnosis is anorexia nervosa.”

But physicians have simply stopped following the law. In at least Oregon, California and Colorado, patients with eating disorders have already qualified and died through assisted suicide. Despite the claim that this is illegal, in Colorado—the sole state to report “malnutrition” as a qualifying illness for assisted suicide—at least 30 MAID deaths between 2017 to 2024 were due to “severe protein calorie malnutrition.” The main lobby group for assisted suicide claims it is illegal to prescribe the “treatment” for eating disorders, and in response, the number of assisted suicides for eating disorders has increased nationwide.

Unfortunately, this follows a larger trend. A Washington state health department report in 2022 found that a third of all relevant physicians in the state failed to submit legally mandated compliance forms for assisted suicide. The result: The state looked hard at the practice, at the assisted-suicide physicians blatantly failing to follow the most minimal of safeguards, and then decided this year to discontinue “suspend” its monitoring program for the procedure.

Previous articles by Alexander Raikin. (Articles Link).