Human Exceptionalism

Should laws against assisted suicide be rescinded as “paternalistic?” Should assisted suicide be transformed from what is now a crime (in most places) into a sacred “right to die”? Should assisted suicide be redefined from a form of homicide into a legitimate “medical treatment” readily available to all persistently suffering people, including to the mentally ill? According to Brown University Read More ›

Is the Drug Enforcement Administration scaring doctors away from treating pain aggressively? Bioethicist Wesley J. Smith discusses recent reports on the DEA’’s aggressive pursuit of doctors who prescribe pain medication for chronic pain sufferers. Listen to the podcast here.

What do cicadas have in common with Jack Kevorkian? They share a cacophonous anniversary. In June, after 17 years, cicadas are expected to crawl from underground across the Midwest. These grim insects produce such a din that just one can overpower other sounds. Also in June, exactly 17 years after he first made international headlines for assisting the suicide of Read More ›

Seattle –  “Jack Kevorkian’s decade-long assisted suicide campaign was never about compassion,” says bioethicist and assisted suicide expert Wesley J. Smith. “It was about Kevorkian’s obsession to engage in human vivisection.” Smith, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute and attorney for the International Task Force on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide, urges the media to report the story of Jack Read More ›

Jack Kevorkian is set to be released from prison today. Don’t expect Dr. Death to keep a low profile. He is already scheduled to appear on 60 Minutes, where he will be interviewed by euthanasia proponent Mike Wallace. After that, the rest of the media is likely to extravagantly tout Kevorkian as the compassionate, if eccentric, retired doctor who helped Read More ›

What if hospitals could put a sign over their doors stating, “We reserve the right to refuse life-sustaining care?” People would be outraged. Yet that is precisely what Texas law explicitly grants to hospitals — namely, to say no to wanted life-sustaining treatment, on the basis of subjective judgments about the quality of the patient’s life. It is an example of a Read More ›

Should doctors or others be permitted to euthanize babies born with disabilities or assist the suicides of suffering people who want to die? During the first forty years of the twentieth century, fueled by the eugenics movement, the question was very much on the table. Then the Holocaust, in which euthanasia of the disabled played a central role, demonstrated the Read More ›

Brave New Bioethics Brave New Bioethics is a series of podcasts recorded by Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Wesley J. Smith exploring the many policies and proposals in bioethics, bioscience, and animal liberation that threaten the belief that human life has worth merely and simply because it is human. Episodes are listed below. Cloning Double Talk Hospice Association Refuses to Denounce Read More ›

Here we go again. For the fourth time in eight years, a bill is moving through the California Legislature to legalize physician-assisted suicide. If history is any guide, assisted-suicide proponents and the media will cast the debate in strictly religious terms — as the Catholic Church versus rational modernists. But the coalition opposing AB374 is a broad and diverse political Read More ›