The state of California made a grave error when it legalized physician-assisted suicide. You can call it “aid in dying” or “death with dignity,” but in the end, it’s misguided and dangerous legislation.

History demonstrates that abuse of this law is inevitable. Soon, the terminally ill, the mentally challenged and elderly in California will have cause to fear their doctors and even their own family members. This is not the proper role for a physician. And it’s not the proper role of government.

“Human life need not be extended by every medical means possible, but a person should never be intentionally killed,” writes Dr. Ryan T. Anderson of the Heritage Foundation. “Doctors may help their patients to die a dignified death from natural causes, but they should not kill their patients or help them to kill themselves. This is the reality that such euphemisms as ‘death with dignity’ and ‘aid in dying’ seek to conceal.”

Such laws always end up endangering the weak and vulnerable.

“Where it has been allowed, safeguards purporting to minimize this risk have proved to be inadequate and have often been watered down or eliminated over time,” Anderson notes. “People who deserve society’s assistance are instead offered accelerated death.”

Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, a longtime adviser to President Barack Obama, studied the physician-assisted suicide laws in the Netherlands and found widespread abuse.

“The Netherlands studies fail to demonstrate that permitting physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia will not lead to the non-voluntary euthanasia of children, the demented, the mentally ill, the old, and others,” he wrote for The Atlantic. “Indeed, the persistence of abuse and the violation of safeguards, despite publicity and condemnation, suggest that the feared consequences of legalization are exactly its inherent consequences.”

It’s now common for Dutch doctors to kill the handicapped and the mentally disabled, including infants on the basis of “poor expected quality of life.” A 2014 report showed that numerous psychiatric patients were killed on extremely questionable grounds.

One such case involved “fear of retirement.”

“Another patient who received euthanasia in 2013 was a healthy 63-year-old man,” a Dutch news agency reported. “He worked for a governmental organization and all he did was work. He had never been on holiday. He also used to do volunteer work in his free time. He had already tried and failed to commit suicide once and did not want to go through that again. He also did not want to affect other people. The patient had been treated for depression for many years. However, this had not helped. Now, due to his age, he was close to retirement and wanted to die.”

Physicians “assisted” him by giving him a toxic dose of medications. When he failed to die from drinking their potion, they injected him with more.

“The heart of medicine is healing,” Anderson writes. “Doctors cannot heal by assisting patients to kill themselves or by killing them. They rightly seek to eliminate disease and alleviate pain and suffering. They may not, however, seek to eliminate the patient.”

California’s new law is wrong.