Wesley J. Smith

Chair and Senior Fellow, Center on Human Exceptionalism

Archives

Canadian Minister of Health: ‘Suicidal’ Are Not Eligible for Euthanasia

Wesley J. Smith
February 7, 2023
Assisted-suicide activists play a word game when they insist that the practice isn’t really “suicide.” They claim that a person who seeks death does so only because of serious illness or disability. If a person is healthy, this claim goes, he or she wouldn’t have wanted to die. Thus, assisted suicide isn’t suicide but merely medical aid in dying (MAiD). But the same kind of reasoning could be applied to anyone who seeks to die, regardless of the circumstances. Had the grieving mother’s child not been hit by a car, for example, she wouldn’t be thinking of killing herself. But for his chronic depression, the psychiatric patient wouldn’t want to die. Had the entrepreneur’s business not collapsed, he wouldn’t want to end it all. You get the idea. Canada’s health …

Suicide Tourism Comes to Oregon

Wesley J. Smith
February 5, 2023
Assisted-suicide activists always promise that strict guidelines will protect against abuse. It’s a big con. The guidelines are not really strict. They rely primarily on self-reporting. And they are meant to be temporary: As soon as political conditions permit, the access to doctor-prescribed death expands.

Freedom of Religion on the Chopping Block

Wesley J. Smith
February 2, 2023
Intolerant secularism is on the march. In a blatant campaign of cultural imperialism, secularists and their leftist allies aim to shrivel the “free exercise” of religion to mere “freedom of worship.”

The Fantasy of Living Forever in a Computer

Wesley J. Smith
February 2, 2023
Transhumanists pursue the dream of immortality by hoping to upload their minds into computers — as if the mimicking software would be them. No, it would be a computer program, nothing more. They would still be dead and gone. And here’s another somewhat less ambitious approach to the same goal. Apparently a company is developing technology that would allow you to speak to loved ones after you shuffle off this mortal coil. From the Vice story: The founder of a top metaverse company says that the fast-moving development of ChatGPT has pushed the timeline for one of his most ambitious and eccentric projects up by a matter of years. In an interview with Motherboard, Somnium Space’s Artur Sychov said a user has started to integrate OpenAI’s chatbot …

Here Comes ‘Transableism’

Wesley J. Smith
January 27, 2023
Once surgically altering people who feel they are the different sex than they were  when born becomes normalized, we will soon be ready for the next abyss. What is that? “Transableism.”

To Reduce Abortions, Should Giving Birth Be Free?

Wesley J. Smith
January 18, 2023
With Roe v. Wade now in the dustbin of history, the pro-life movement is switching gears to the difficult task of persuading the country to reject abortion. Americans United for Life is in the thick of that fray and has now issued a white paper arguing that birth should be free to every mother in the USA.

The Transgender Tide Is Turning

Wesley J. Smith
January 16, 2023
The time has come for an intense but mutually respectful societal conversation that focuses not only on the causes of transgenderism and the potential benefits of transitioning such people, but also the many risks and alternatives that can care compassionately for suffering people while maintaining cultural equilibrium. Our future thriving requires nothing less.

Maryland Catholic Hospital Liable for Refusing Transgender Hysterectomy

Wesley J. Smith
January 12, 2023
Two principles of Catholic health-care ethics forbid removing healthy organs and sterilizing a patient absent a necessity caused by a pathology, such as cancer. These principles are increasingly in conflict with the transgender movement that has the ACLU and others suing when Catholic hospitals refuse transgender surgeries based on these religiously based precepts.

‘Baby Farms’ Are Already Here

Wesley J. Smith
January 2, 2023
Will artificial wombs replace natural gestation? Until very recently, that notion was a far-fetched conjuring out of futuristic novels such as “Brave New World.” But research is fast advancing that could make this dystopian prospect a reality.

The Fear of Suffering is Driving Us Crazy

Wesley J. Smith
December 20, 2022
But eliminating suffering is impossible. Not only is the goal Utopian, but it leads to ever-more-extreme distortions of decency and a collapse of public policy rationality—which ironically, can cause the very “evil” that suffering abolitionists yearn so desperately to prevent.