This week, New York’s Democrat-led state Senate passed legislation dubbed the Medical Aid in Dying Act. The state House had previously passed the bill last month. The Act, which is framed as advancing “death with dignity,” would grant mentally competent adults who have been given a prognosis of six months or less to live the freedom to request and receive self-administered life-ending drugs.

The legislation has gone to the desk of Democrat Governor Kathy Hochul, who has not publicly voiced her views on the issue of physician-assisted suicide. Whether she elects to sign the legislation into law remains to be seen. Should Hochul sign the bill, it would make New York the 12th state to legalize assisted suicide (Oregon was the first back in 1997).

The Medical Aid in Dying Act represents the growing creep of what many have termed the Culture of Death, with its two main tenets being abortion and legalized suicide.

In each case, the excuses for legalization are often tied to emotive and sympathetic scenarios, such as the rape of a young woman resulting in pregnancy or an individual suffering from excruciating pain as they slowly die from an incurable disease.

Of course, the desire in both cases would be to alleviate the individuals from these painful situations. And yet, when the solution raised is death, that points to a culture that has lost its moral compass.

Morally, death can only be offered as a legitimate answer when it comes to the issue of administering justice for capital crimes, such as murder. Yet the irony is that the Culture of Death more often than not shuns capital punishment as barbaric while celebrating the murder of preborn babies as advances in “liberty for women” and their “right to choose.”

Furthermore, once the Culture of Death is embraced, seeking to reverse it is nearly impossible. Case in point: Despite the fact that the U.S. Supreme Court rightly overturned Roe v. Wade, the number of abortions in the country has only increased.

Much of this is thanks to the development and easy access to chemical abortion pills, which make up the most abortions now. Despite growing knowledge of and ability to preserve the life of preborn children at earlier and earlier stages of development, public opinion in maintaining a woman’s right to abortion remains much the same.

When it comes to suicide, there seems to be a similar and mind-numbing cognitive dissonance at play as well. How can suicide be both a widely recognized terrible evil, and is even used as an excuse to justify “transing” gender-confused children, and yet advanced as a viable and in fact preferable option for people should they feel they need it?

Such is the inherent contradiction within the Culture of Death.

In truth, the root of the issue is religious. Everyone has a belief system, a god they worship. The morality upon which the U.S. and the West were built was the Judeo-Christian ethic. That ethic recognizes two fundamental truths: mankind is created in the image of God, and mankind is not god. That every human is an image bearer of God is foundational to the West’s recognition of the inherent dignity in every human being. It undergirds the whole understanding of human rights.

As the Declaration of Independence observes, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Yet All men are gods unto themselves is the fundamental message behind the Culture of Death. It teaches as its highest doctrine the worship of self, the “follow your heart” mantra. Thus, it should be up to the self when one chooses to die. Furthermore, society writ large should accommodate this “freedom.”

Where this leads is a slippery slope to greater moral degradation and inhumanity that will ultimately lead to social collapse.

Hopefully, Hochul, the self-identified Roman Catholic, vetoes this legislation.