Human Exceptionalism

Center on Human Exceptionalism

Twenty-five years ago, Newsweek published my first essay. In the wake of my friend’s suicide under the influence of the Hemlock Society, I worried that some suicides would be “promoted as a virtue” if assisted suicide, or euthanasia, was ever accepted. (Assisted suicide involves a doctor’s knowingly prescribing drugs for use in the patient’s suicide; euthanasia involves a doctor’s lethally injecting the patient.) After that, I predicted, eligibility for hastened death would expand to those “who don’t have a good ‘quality’ of life,” “perhaps with the prospect of organ harvesting thrown in as a plum to society.” I thought the essay would be uncontroversial. Then came the hate mail, at a decibel level that I had not experienced theretofore in my years …

Its promise of a kind of immortality is an ersatz version of Christian hope for a resurrection in a glorified body.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) makes no moral distinctions between humans and animals, believing, as its alpha wolf Ingrid Newkirk put it once, “A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.” The organization opposes any instrumental use of animals—no matter how beneficial to human thriving—insisting that they are “not ours to eat, wear, experiment on, use for entertainment, or abuse in any other way.” PETA’s adamant opposition to animal research puts it squarely in the anti-science camp. Not because they are ethically opposed to such experiments—although that marks the group as anti-human in my book—but because the organization routinely slanders animal researchers as cruel and sadistic and persists in its false and dishonest claim Read More ›

Writing at First Things, Senior Fellow Wesley J. Smith discusses the alarming first case of child euthanasia in Belgium. Belgium is the only country to have legalized physician-assisted suicide for children of any age. Read more from Wesley J. Smith at First Things.

Medicare will now reimburse doctors $86 for half-hour consultations about the kind of treatment patients would—or would not—want should they become incapacitated. Writing at The Weekly Standard, DI Sr. Fellow Wesley J. Smith explains why this new regulation exposes patients to the threat of a doctor’s potential refusal to provide them with the life-extending treatment that they want. Read his article at The Weekly Standard.

By Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Wesley J. Smith. Originally published at First Things. A story out of Belgium vividly illustrates how our elderly are becoming personae non gratae in a society increasingly obsessed with avoiding difficulty. Francis and Anne are healthy and happily married octogenarians. Not wanting to live without each other, they plan to die together on their sixty-fourth anniversary. Rather than engaging suicide prevention, their children procured a doctor to euthanize them. Digging more deeply into the Daily Mail story, we can glean that there’s more to this case than the couple’s fear of widowhood: <blockquote<John Paul said the double euthanasia of his parents was the ‘best solution’. ‘If one of them should die, who would remain would Read More ›