assisted suicide

Click here to read Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Wesley J. Smith and Case Western Reserve University Associate Professor Jonathan Adler debate the legality of assisted suicide.

As Terri Schiavo approaches her 94th hour without food or water, tensions rise across the country on both sides of the issue. Below, Wesley J. Smith, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, attorney, and ethicist, released a statement regarding the latest ruling by a judge in Florida to block Terri’s feeding tube to be reinserted, thus sustaining her life. Read More ›

ASSISTED SUICIDE/EUTHANASIA activists are sure a restless bunch. They never seem able to settle on the right terminology to convince people to support legalizing mercy killing. First, it was euthanasia, a perfectly fine word that had a meaning generally akin to today’s concept of hospice before being hijacked by the right-to-die crowd in the early 20th century. When “euthanasia” didn’t Read More ›

It was bound to happen. First, proponents of the culture of death brought us physician-assisted suicide (PAS). Now, we must contend with IAS – Internet-assisted suicide. Yes, you read right. As reported by Julia Scheeres in the June 8 San Francisco Chronicle, suicide promotion and facilitation has entered cyberspace. In “A Virtual Path to Suicide,” Scheeres demonstrates how indifferent to Read More ›

For many years, the bunker-buster in the pro-assisted-suicide arsenal has been its supposed inevitability. Pointing to multiple public-opinion polls showing support for assisted suicide generally in the high 60-percent range, euthanasia advocates claimed that only a rigid, religiously motivated minority – e.g., Catholics – was keeping Americans from accessing the “ultimate civil right.” Soon, they cheerily predicted, the anti-assisted-suicide medievalists Read More ›

This article, published by BreakPoint, mentions Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Wesley Smith: According to Wesley Smith of the Discovery Institute, “futile-care” theory is “one of the most dangerous topics [under discussion] in contemporary bioethics. The rest of the article can be found here.

There is an old folk wisdom: “You are known by the company you keep.” As is true of most folk wisdom, the saying has much to recommend it. To use an extreme example, if you hung out with and financially supported a known terrorist, most people would reasonably think that you were a terrorist too. Which brings to mind the Read More ›

A wise man once said, “Don’t believe everything you read in the papers.” That is good advice, especially for stories that involve assisted suicide. Take the media’s reporting about the lawsuit between the State of Oregon and United States Attorney General John Ashcroft (Oregon v. Ashcroft), which has generally been abysmal. With reporters generally looking with favor upon legalizing assisted Read More ›

When liberals ask me why they should oppose physician-assisted suicide (PAS), I always reply, “I can summarize a big reason in just three letters: HMO.” That always raises an eyebrow. Liberals hate HMOs. Then I ask, “Do you know how much it costs for the drugs used in an assisted suicide?” They usually shake their heads, no. Answering my own Read More ›

The “Hippocratic Oath” sniffed Dr. Sherwin Nuland dismissively in the February 24, 2000 New England Journal of Medicine, “has been embraced over approximately the last 200 years far more as a symbol of professional cohesion than for its content … Ultimately, a physician’s conduct at the bedside is a matter of individual conscience.” What a frightening thought. When I tell Read More ›