Revised Edition of Award Winning Bioethics Book, ‘Culture of Death,’ Coming in 2015

News Release
Discovery Institute
Tessa Rath
(206) 292-0401 x107
trath@discovery.org

Revised Edition of Award Winning Bioethics Book, Culture of Death, Coming in 2015

SEATTLE — Wesley J. Smith, director of Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism, has agreed with Encounter Books to revise and update his award winning 2001 book, Culture of Death: The Assault on Medical Ethics in America.

In Culture of Death, Smith takes aim at the varied threats to human life and universal equality posed by the modern bioethics movement that increasingly promote such destructive ideas as the “human non person,” while also advocating life-threatening public policies like legalizing euthanasia and imposing health care rationing.

The New York Times wrote, “Smith argues that American medicine has replaced a time-honored sanctity of life with a grim utilitarian model, in which the medically defenseless have not just a right, but a duty, to die.”

“The issues Wesley Smith raised so ably a decade ago are getting more troubling, not less so,” said Bruce Chapman, former US Ambassador to the United Nations Organizations in Vienna. “Consideration of the public policy implications no longer can be postponed.”

Culture of Death was named Best Health Book of the Year and one of the 10 Outstanding Books of the Year at the 2001 Independent Publishers Book Awards.

Best-selling novelist Dean Koontz said of Culture of Death: “The best survey of utilitarian bioethics written for a general audience that I have yet seen. I highly recommend Culture of Death. You will find it more hair-raising than any novel you’ve ever read.”

“I am very heartened to have the opportunity to update Culture of Death. So much has happened in the field of bioethics since the book was first published,” said Smith. People need to know that the threats to the weak and vulnerable are increasing in a medical system increasingly driven by cost benefit analysis, centralized government control, and in a milieu in which the bodies of weak and vulnerable are alarmingly looked upon by some as corn crops ripe for the harvest.”

No specific publication date has been set, but it is expected to be sometime in 2015 or early 2016.