Assisted-suicide advocacy is wrapped in euphemisms and false assurances. We are often told that medicalized killing will be “a last resort” reserved for the terminally ill, to be deployed only in the context of a long-term relationship with a caring doctor and, even then, strictly when there is no other way to alleviate suffering. But that’s just sales puffery. In Read More ›
The other day, I read a column in the National Post that made my stomach turn. It wasn’t the quality of the writing, which was quite good, but the content. The writer celebrated a recent Canadian Supreme Court ruling that determined lethal-injection termination is a charter right. As a result, euthanasia will soon be bureaucratized and normalized—made banal—in Canada: [S]ooner or later, death will become a Read More ›
Secularist threats against religious liberty are spreading like a stain. Thus, I was attracted immediately to Bruce Abramson’s Mosaic column, How Jews Can Help Christians Live as a Creative Minority. Abramson warns Christians that the space to practice their faith in the way they live is shrinking. Tell me something I don’t know, I thought. But my attention focused when Abramson (citing political scientist Peter Read More ›
Back in 1991, I received an invitation to a party. My elderly friend Frances wanted to die. Her plan, she said, was to hold a life celebration with her closest friends: We would hold her hand, kiss her cheek, and tell her how much she meant to us—as she expressed her love for us. Then she would take an overdose Read More ›
The country has been roiled in recent weeks by videos showing two Planned Parenthood executives chirpily telling pro-life undercover investigators that fetal organs could be had for a price. The executives—both themselves abortionists—explained that their techniques could be adapted to “crush” fetuses in a “less crunchy” manner so as to better insure harvests suitable for research. There have, of course, Read More ›
Afew years ago, I spoke about end-of-life care at a town-hall event; it quickly devolved into an intense debate on assisted suicide. When the time came for audience questions, a self-described “mentally ill” woman took the microphone and declared that she had a right to doctor-prescribed death. More than half the audience burst into applause. Helping the mentally ill commit Read More ›
During World War II, German doctors euthanized disabled babies and adults. As Robert Jay Lifton reported in The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, no one forced these doctors to kill. Many of them believed euthanasia to be a “healing treatment” that ended “unlivable” lives, liberated families from the burden of caregiving, and kept the country from Read More ›
In 1991, my friend Frances invited me to a “going away party.” She wasn’t moving or going on vacation. Frances wanted her closest friends to come to her home, to tell her how much she meant to us, and to hold her hand as she committed suicide. We refused. Validating Frances’s suicide was unthinkable. We supported her life, not her Read More ›
Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End is an eminently useful book. Contrary to the implication of his title, Gawande’s subject isn’t death—the dying aren’t dead, after all, they are living. Rather, his purpose is to help readers navigate the treacherous shoals of medical and caregiving choices that we or loved ones face as we grow Read More ›
This month, the Canadian Supreme Court trampled democratic deliberation by unanimously conjuring a constitutional right to “termination of life” for anyone who has an “irremediable medical condition” and wants to die. Note the scope of the judicial fiat is not limited to the terminally ill: The ruling grants competent adults a right to die if they have an “illness, disease, Read More ›