In the latest episode of Breaking Battlegrounds, hosts Chuck Warren and Sam Stone welcome back Alexander Raikin, a visiting fellow in the Bioethics, Technology, and Human Flourishing Program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Raikin has been sounding the alarm on how assisted suicide laws are spreading across the U.S. while safeguards meant to protect vulnerable patients are being quietly abandoned.

He explains how New York is set to become the 12th state to legalize assisted suicide, even as the American Medical Association has repeatedly reaffirmed its opposition—calling the practice “incompatible with the role of a physician as a healer.” At the same time, oversight in existing programs is collapsing. Washington and Colorado are missing thousands of legally required compliance forms. New Mexico stopped reporting entirely, citing “budgetary reasons,” despite a $5 billion budget increase.

Raikin shares chilling examples, including a 29-year-old woman with a history of anorexia who said she was pressured by a physician to end her life—only to later recover from her illness. Meanwhile, Washington state reported 524 assisted suicides in 2023, nearly matching Chicago’s homicide total that year.

The discussion underscores a stark reality: while governments enforce strict rules on taxes and licenses, they’re turning a blind eye to violations in programs that literally determine who lives and who dies. Raikin warns that America is dismantling its own suicide safeguards, putting the most vulnerable at risk.

Transcript

**Sam Stone: **Alexander, moving on to some of the articles you've written recently. I want to start with a piece we'll get at the end to a piece you wrote in May, a father battles Canada's suicide machine, mostly because I don't really want to be in tears for the first 20 minutes of this thing. That was one of the most painful pieces I've read in a long time. But starting now, a piece you wrote recently, how America abandoned its suicide safeguards. Key protections are being ignored. New York has recently moved forward with a Canada style medical suicide program. Tell us what's going on there.

**Alexander Raikin:**Yeah, so New York State is set to become the 12th state to legalize assisted suicide in the US. This is one of the challenges that we see is that there are all these new states that are voting to pass and legalize assisted suicide. At the same time, the American Medical Association on the same date that the New York State Senate voted in favor of passing an assisted suicide program.

The American Medical Association for like the sixth time voted to support its condemnation of assisted suicide, declaring it as incompatible with the role of a physician as a healer. So you have this sort of irony or contradiction where you have medical experts saying that, no you cannot ethically pass an assisted suicide program that scripts vulnerable patients from the right from the right to life.

And yet you have all of these, virtually all of them are progressive states voting to pass legalized suicide programs. And what we're seeing is that these programs are meant to be legal, they're meant to be safe. And yet, so this article that I wrote for UnHerd, we're talking about thousands of legally required compliance forms that were never submitted to state authorities.

And you would think that the state authorities would be raising this issue. Hey, this is a legal requirement. If physicians do not do this, they are breaking the law and criminal law. In some cases, this could be even up to a felony. And yet those states have decided that they look at the fire and they decided to remove the smoke alarm. And so Washington State has announced that they're no longer going to be reporting on the state of legal compliance with their assisted suicide program. The state of New Mexico has similarly.

**Chuch Warren: **For for budgetary reasons. For budgetary reasons. And by the way, the year they announced they're not doing that, their budget increased statewide five billion dollars. But for budgetary reasons, I what's this cost, 100 grand? 150 grand?

**Alexander Raikin: **It's even worse than that because it's not just that this is quite literally pennies to write an annual report and to state to the public, our physicians, as they do every year, where like in the most recent year, something like a third of all US, of all assisted suicides in the state of Washington failed to report on time the

assisted suicide and fail to submit necessary legally required paperwork. But this, the states literally passed referenda for suicide. And under the terms of referenda, the voters decided to give funding to the states to do proper legal legal compliance.

**Chuck Warren: **Well, isn't that what Newsom's doing right now with the initiative that passed in California and he won't budget it and you're supposed to budget it? You know what's funny about this? They don't want this paperwork, but can you imagine if these doctors didn't file their annual tax returns what they would do?

**Alexander Raikin: **Yeah, I mean, this is people's, people are being prescribed suicide pills, right? Suicide concoctions. They're taking these untested, unresearched suicide concoctions. They're drinking it. And the physicians who are meant to report what happened, they're meant to report, I mean. Just to tell you how bad the situation is, okay.

Just in the state of Colorado, we have somewhere around 200 assisted suicides where, excuse me, 200, where almost 300 assisted suicides where the written request paperwork was never submitted to state authorities. What this means is that we don't even know if the person who took the assisted suicide medication even wanted to die because there's no paperwork. And this isn't like missing signatures. This is written request paperwork that the physician legally is required to submit and then never submitted it.

**Chuck Warren: **Well, and that's crazy. Yeah, and that's crazy because the government has a cow if you don't file it for your business license or renew it, if you do your state taxes, if you don't pay your property taxes, you get these notices right away. But for the actual life of a human being, they don't feel it's necessary to follow up with it. By the way, you were talking about it, I looked this up. So in 2023, Washington state assisted 524 people to terminate their life.

That same year Chicago had 617 homicides. I mean, they're matching Chicago almost. I mean, this is crazy. And they can't find the time to do the paperwork.

**Alexander Raikin: **Yeah, and if you look at if you look at who exactly is dying through this, right, this isn't just like a representative sample of people who live in Washington state or Colorado, right? We're talking about people who are vulnerable. We're talking about people with serious illnesses. I mean, one of the cases that I talked about in my report was this 29 year old woman named Jane. We don't actually know her her real name.

But this is according to paperwork that was filed in a lawsuit in Colorado, where this woman with eating disorders or the history of anorexia openly talked about how she felt coerced to die by an eating disorder, by an assisted suicide clinician. And she was talking about how this clinician told her that she was going to, that this physician was going to make an exception for her and allow her to die.

And this is someone who is trying to get better and indeed did get better from the eating disorder.

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