The late, great Nat Hentoff befriended me during the 1990s, I don’t remember exactly when. Having read my work against euthanasia, he reached out to me for an interview for one of his columns. That initial professional interaction bloomed into a good friendship, mostly conducted over the phone, but also in person over meals whenever I was able to get Read More ›
Assisted suicide proponents always promise that facilitated death will be offered solely and strictly to the mentally competent. But once a society accepts the premise of euthanasia—that it is acceptable to eliminate suffering by eliminating the sufferer—there is no way to restrict the putative “right to die” to the mentally healthy. Mental illness often causes greater anguish than any physical disease Read More ›
Should anyone outside the military be forced to kill? Most people would say no. But with the ubiquitous availability of abortion—and the push to legalize assisted suicide and euthanasia—doctors may soon find themselves required to take lives or risk being booted from the medical profession. Let’s call this threat “medical martyrdom.” Laws today generally protect doctors from being conscripted into Read More ›
Writing at First Things, Senior Fellow Wesley J. Smith discusses the alarming first case of child euthanasia in Belgium. Belgium is the only country to have legalized physician-assisted suicide for children of any age. Read more from Wesley J. Smith at First Things.
The death of a terminally ill seventeen-year-old boy made headlines recently, as Belgium’s first case of child euthanasia. I don’t understand the sudden fuss. The Netherlands has long allowed minors to request and receive euthanasia: Dutch children down to age sixteen can receive euthanasia without their parents’ consent, and children can be killed by doctors with parental consent starting at age twelve. Read More ›
Thousands of medical ethicists and bioethicists, as they are called, professionally guide the unthinkable on its passage through the debatable on its way to becoming the justifiable until it is finally established as the unexceptionable. —Richard John Neuhaus If you want to see what is likely to go awry in medical ethics and public healthcare policy, pay attention to the Read More ›
Human exceptionalism—the unique and equal dignity of man and our obligations to act morally—and its corollaries such as universal human rights has been integral to Western progress. Over the past few hundred years, the ideals of Judeo-Christian moral philosophy and the Enlightenment worked together to create a civilization that, to an ever-increasing degree, sought to effectuate Jefferson’s epochal assertion that Read More ›
Over the past four decades, the Western World has been debating legalizing euthanasia. Despite the efforts of its proponents, over many years, almost all efforts at legalization failed politically and in the courts. In the most notable of these failures, in 1997, the Supreme Court of the United States refused to enact an assisted suicide Roe v. Wade, ruling unanimously Read More ›
If being human is not what conveys moral worth, then what does? The answer to this question varies. But, as we shall see, the increased embrace of human unexceptionalism cuts across a wide array of ideologies. Let’s first look at secular bioethics, the philosophy of health care and public policy taught in our most elite universities. The predominating view in bioethics Read More ›
Healthcare is quickly becoming about much more than the provision and reception of medical treatment. To a disturbing degree, healthcare public policy is becoming a means of imposing a secularist, anti–sanctity-of-life ideology on all of society. Consider the following examples of this accelerating trend: Erasing pharmacists’ conscience rights in Washington: In 2007, Washington state’s Board of Pharmacy—at the prompting of Read More ›