Have you noticed that suicide prevention campaigns these days don’t mention assisted suicide? Perhaps they don’t want to court controversy, or perhaps organizers have swallowed the notion that the suicide of the terminally ill isn’t really suicide—it’s “death with dignity.” Whatever the reason, this crucial lapse of proffered care illustrates how our society is less concerned about the suicides of Read More ›
The assisted-suicide movement has come a long way in just a couple of decades. Consider, for example, this recent item from the San Francisco Chronicle: “Charlotte Shultz [the wife of former secretary of state George Shultz] accepted the invitation to be honorary co- chair (with Dianne Feinstein) at a Nov. 5 luncheon and program for Compassion & Choices of Northern Read More ›
I am having trouble keeping up: Every day now almost, it is one once unthinkable thing after another. In the UK, a woman tried to commit suicide by swallowing anti-freeze, and doctors refused to save her! From the story: Kerrie Wooltorton arrived fully conscious in hospital clutching a ‘living will’ in which she stated she did not want to be Read More ›
For the past two decades, euthanasia/assisted-suicide ideologues have worked overtime to conflate palliative carethe medical alleviation of pain and other distressing symptoms of serious illnesswith intentionally ending the life of the patient. The movements first target was the hospice, a specialized form of care for the dying created forty years ago in the United Kingdom by the late, great medical Read More ›
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 ›
Should laws against assisted suicide be rescinded as “paternalistic?”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 ›
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 ›
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 ›