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 ›
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 ›
This article, published by LifeSiteNews, quotes Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Wesley J. Smith: A culture that seeks to escape suffering and inconvenience at all costs will end by eliminating not only pain, but by ending the lives of those suffering or whose condition burden their families, warned bioethicist Wesley J. Smith this weekend. The rest of the article can be Read More ›
The media has been abuzz in recent days at the arrests of four people for allegedly assisting the suicide of Georgia man, John Celmer. The circumstances of Celmer’s tragic death cast an important light on the assisted suicide movement that is too often overlooked in the media: Celmer wasn’t dying. Indeed, he had been successfully treated for jaw and neck Read More ›
On December 5, Montana District judge Dorothy McCarter ruled in Baxter v. Montana that the state law banning assisted suicide violates not only the right to privacy guaranteed in the Montana constitution but also the constitutional clause that reads, “The dignity of the human being is inviolable.” McCarter found here a “fundamental right” for the terminally ill to “die with 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 ›
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 ›