Human Exceptionalism

Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Wesley J. Smith will be inteviewed by Tony Snow on today’s Bill O’Reilly radio program. Check your local listings for air times.

It is a bitter irony that even as we are enlarging our commitment to human equality in many areas, we are turning our backs on it in others. In particular, we may be about to eliminate from our society people with Down syndrome (DS) and other genetically caused disabilities. With the development of prenatal genetic diagnosis, the drive toward eugenics Read More ›

The culture of death is like heroin: Once you start to mainline, it is never enough. Consider the experience of the Netherlands. When euthanasia was quasi-legalized there by court order in 1973, access to mercy killing and assisted suicide were supposed to be limited to the very few. The killing would all be governed by euthanasia guidelines that, the Dutch Read More ›

This article, published by BreakPoint, mentions Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Wesley J. Smith: Timmerman was quoted recently by bioethicist Wesley J. Smith in the online publication To the Source. Smith rightly claims that while infanticide was commonly accepted in ancient times, only the Jews and the Christians actively opposed it. The rest of the article can be found here.

In Liberalism’s Troubled Search for Equality , Robert P. Jones takes the measure of contemporary assisted-suicide advocacy through a distinctly liberal lens. He has impeccable credentials for this task: He is the director and senior fellow at the progressive think tank Center for American Values in Public Life, given birth by the progressive political-advocacy group People for the American Way. Read More ›

Support for infanticide is becoming positively trendy. Where once support for killing babies born with birth defects was a fringe belief, it became respectable — even mainstream — after doctors from Groningen University Medical Center in the Netherlands admitted in 2004 that they euthanized dying and profoundly disabled babies under the terms of what has come to be called the Read More ›

This article, published by CitizenLink, is about Discovery Institute Fellow Wesley J. Smith: Since leaving his legal career in 1985 to pursue writing and public advocacy, Wesley J. Smith has worn many hats in the bioethics arena. He is an award-winning author, senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, an attorney for the International Task Force on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide and Read More ›

Four months ago, a little girl in Samoa was born with serious disabilities. Doctors did not believe the baby could survive, so they urged the parents not to feed their daughter. But the parents loved their daughter and snuck food to Miracle. Beyond all medical expectations, Miracle survived. Ponder, if you will, what I just wrote: Miracle’s parents had to Read More ›

The United States is a nation governed by law at the federal, state and local levels. Sometimes these laws differ with each other. That’s where the great principle of federalism comes in. Federalism permits state laws to be in conflict with each other, and even with the federal government. But that’s OK. The sometimes messy business of federalism permits different Read More ›