When I was practicing law from the mid-1970s into the 1980s, there was tremendous emphasis given in the popular media and within the bar association to the cause of suicide prevention. Hotlines proliferated, anti-suicide billboards were ubiquitous, and a great deal of attention was paid to saving the lives of despairing people. Attitudes have shifted since then. Not only does Read More ›
Never in human history has suffering been more readily relieved than today. And yet, paradoxically, we have never been more afraid of suffering. Our forebears would find this very odd. For them, horrendous suffering was ubiquitous, the bane of rich and poor alike. For example, before anesthesia, the agony of surgery may have killed more patients than surgical procedures helped. Read More ›
This article, published by the Associated Press, quotes Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Wesley J. Smith: Juries are often sympathetic to those who kill a spouse out of what is portrayed to be love and compassion, but the message that sends is unclear, said Wesley J. Smith, a California lawyer who wrote a 2006 book “Forced Exit: Euthanasia, Assisted Suicide and Read More ›
If you want to see what direction health care is going, just read the July 12 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). Of course, reading a medical journal isn’t on most people’s “to do” lists. Even medical professionals who do read journal articles rarely do so to gain insight into the latest shifts in the cultural or Read More ›
Until very recently, the West saw religious liberty as a weight-bearing pillar of human freedom. Thus, the very first clause of the First Amendment (1789) states, Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof More broadly, Article 18 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) provides: Everyone has the Read More ›
This article, published by The Province, quotes from Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Wesley J. Smith: “In only 23 years, Dutch doctors have gone from being permitted to kill the terminally ill who ask for it, to killing the chronically ill who ask for it, to killing newborn babies in their cribs because they have birth defects, even though by definition Read More ›
The Dutch like their euthanasia — but sure are sensitive when a prominent person describes the horrors that medicalized killing has unleashed. Latest example: Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum criticized Dutch euthanasia in an interview with James Dobson, stating in part: Ten percent of all deaths, and half of those people are euthanized involuntarily, because they are old or sick. And Read More ›
This article, published by The Daily Caller, quotes Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Wesley Smith: American bioethicist Wesley Smith disagrees. “This whole assisted suicide euthanasia issue is a symptom, not a cause,” Smith told TheDC. “I think it’s a symptom of a society that has decided that it can’t establish moral standards.” The rest of the article can be found here.
I spoke at a town-hall event about end-of-life care recently that, unfortunately, devolved mostly into an intense debate on assisted suicide. When the time came for audience questions, a self-described “mentally ill” woman took the microphone and strongly declared that she too should have the right to doctor-prescribed death. More than half the audience applauded, validating the woman’s potential suicide. Ten years ago, Read More ›
How are we to best care for the dying? This crucial issue impacts us at our core, not only in light of our own eventual demises, but because we all want the best for those we love. Happily, hospice and advances in pain control allow for truly compassionate care. Unlike much of human history, today patients can die peacefully at Read More ›