Human Exceptionalism

LAST WEEK, Congress took up the issues of pain control and physician-assisted suicide, with the House voting 271-156 to pass the Pain Relief Promotion Act. The legislation, if passed, would improve pain control while deterring physician-assisted suicide. Doctors who prescribe lethal drugs for the purpose of killing their terminally ill patients would be subject to losing their federal licenses to Read More ›

It is the unfortunate nature of man that financial imperatives often supersede important moral and ethical principles. We often tolerate or even celebrate inherently unethical and immoral actions as long as they make a buck.  Simply put, mammon has the power to distort moral intuitions. Take the issue of assisted suicide. Opponents of legalization warn that if killing is ever Read More ›

Sacramento, California It was every liberal’s dream of diverse, grass-roots political activism: more than a hundred people demonstrating angrily in front of the California state capitol against pending legislation that threatened people who are poor, who are disabled, and who are vulnerable. Disability-rights activists in wheel-chairs marched in solidarity with white medical professionals, alongside African-American clergy and advocates for the Read More ›

IT SEEMS AS IF HE HAS ALWAYS been part of the American cultural landscape, leaving dead bodies at hospital emergency-room doors, wearing Founding Father costumes to court, accusing his opponents of conducting a modern-day Inquisition. But only nine years ago, no one had heard of Jack Kevorkian, when a March 1990 newspaper article described an offer that seemed more like Read More ›

Assisted suicide in Oregon has operated in a shroud of secrecy since the procedure was legalized by a 1997 referendum. But a new study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, purports to shed light on the law’s actual workings. Advocates of assisted suicide claim the report proves all is well. But a close reading reveals that many of the Read More ›

WHEN JACK KEVORKIAN APPEARED on 60 Minutes the Sunday before Thanksgiving to explain his killing of Thomas Youk, a man with Lou Gehrig’s disease, Kevorkian justified his crime to Mike Wallace by claiming Youk was scared to death of choking on his own saliva. Wallace, a vocal euthanasia supporter, accepted this excuse at face value rather than digging more deeply. Read More ›

THE BODY OF HOMICIDE VICTIM Joseph Tushkowski underwent “a bizarre mutilation,” proclaimed Oakland County (Mich.) medical examiner L.J. Dragovic in mid-June. According to the autopsy findings, the mutilator, after killing Tushkowski with a lethal injection, crudely ripped out his kidneys. He didn’t even bother to remove the dead man’s clothes, but simply lifted up the sweater, did his dirty work, Read More ›

People who are elderly, disabled, prematurely born, or seriously ill have much to fear from the medical intelligentsia — those bioethicists and moral philosophers who have in recent years transformed medical ethics. It was bioethicists and moral philosophers, after all, who made it acceptable to dehydrate to death people diagnosed as permanently unconscious — a practice that has already spread Read More ›