Wesley J. Smith

Wesley J. Smith joined host Simon O’Connor on Family Matters, a show from Family First New Zealand, to discuss current efforts to force medical professionals with religious and conscientious objections to participate in assisted suicide and euthanasia. Smith specifically highlights the danger that these threats pose, as they would drive talented people away from the medical field. Smith and O’Connor also discuss the trend of medicine becoming something like a “vending machine” as it’s been made into a consumer service. “Patient autonomy, of course, is a part of medicine,” Smith explains. “But doctors are not automatons and they should not be forced to do things that run contrary to their beliefs and their ethics.” Read Wesley J. Smith’s piece, “Nuns Read More ›

Many Western countries and jurisdictions are legalizing euthanasia and assisted suicide. That opens up a problem for the death pushers. Since states aren’t going to get into the wet work of the actual killing, medical professionals and caregivers are going to be conscripted to do the deadly deeds — even if that means violating their religious beliefs and moral consciences.

Instead of resisting this rank authoritarianism, the medical and bioethics establishments are increasingly going along. This proposed coercion includes requiring doctors’ participation in suicides when patients starve and dehydrate themselves to death — known as VSED for “voluntary stop eating and drinking.”

As I wrote a few weeks ago here, the British Medical Association just so opined. And now, following closely in that guidance’s wake, a major article in the Journal of Health & Biomedical Law argues similarly — using dementia patients as the prime example — that doctors have to both inform patients about their right to commit suicide by VSED and ease the process by providing palliative care against the agony that killing oneself in that manner causes.

Nature — the most prestigious science journal in the world — has editorialized in favor of requiring scientists to register with governments as a condition of participation in the sector. Here’s the context. South Africa has legislation pending that would require scientists to register with a government body or face significant legal consequences. Nature applauds the authoritarian idea. From the editorial (my emphasis): What do engineers, environmental-health officers and health-care workers have in common? These occupations can, in some instances, be practised only by people who have registered with a relevant professional body. This typically requires candidates to pass qualifying exams and adhere to a code of practice that includes sanctions for violations. The process is intended to create the highest standards of quality, Read More ›

I once respected Anthony Fauci. But, during the Covid pandemic, I believe his power and the astonishing international celebrity generated by a fawning media went to his head. Worse, his hubris brought great disrepute on public health institutions and harmed the nation and its people.

But mainstream bioethicists — mostly political progressives who deploy their supposed authority as experts to push mostly left-wing health and political causes — see Fauci as one of their own. With the doctor now in some hot legal water, and his reputation visibly tarnished by recent disclosures from his diary and text messages, prominent bioethicists have published an open letter telling us to leave Fauci alone. From the “Open Letter of Support for Anthony Fauci from the Bioethics Community,” published in Bioethics Today (emphasis within the text):

As individuals concerned with ethics in science, medicine, and public health, we wish to express our dismay at the approach taken by Senate leaders to pursue an unwarranted, ill-advised, and frankly bizarre vendetta against a scientist, Dr. Anthony Fauci, rather than making a sincere effort to learn from the painful experiences of the pandemic to improve national preparedness. No human is perfect, but Dr. Fauci deserves appreciation for his decades of service to American science, and he deserves respect for taking on the difficult work of advising federal policy makers during the worst plague of this century. We condemn the decision to hold him legally in contempt of Congress as the outcome of a staged public persecution, and we fear the future implications of politically and legally targeting scientists who advise the government.

Hardly a “persecution,” and Fauci’s status as a “scientist” is irrelevant.

The late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus famously wrote that bioethicists “professionally guide the unthinkable on its passage through the debatable on its way to becoming the justifiable until it is finally established as the unexceptional.”

He was right. Radical bioethical policies don’t just appear like magic out of the ether. Controversial—even pernicious—ideas are often debated in bioethics and medical journals where few among the public ever see them. Then, if a general consensus is reached within the field, policies once considered “unthinkable” are “suddenly” elevated into the justifiable and become unexceptional public policy.

Here are just two examples. Legalizing assisted suicide was once way beyond the pale. Then, bioethicists began arguing in favor of such laws, after which hastened death became debatable, then justifiable, and now, in many jurisdictions, so unremarkable that many thousands of people have died by that method.

The Ethicist column in the New York Times — a high-brow Dear Abby — has blessed adultery if one’s spouse is permanently incapacitated.

The questioner is a woman who married an older man. Her husband is now incapacitated by advancing Alzheimer’s. She is raising their child alone and has to earn a living. She still wants intimacy and asks whether it is okay for her to date. The Ethicist’s unethical response:

It’s obvious that you’ve had a lot to carry for a long time, not least caring for your husband as his Alzheimer’s has progressed. And you do owe him continued stewardship as his spouse. But given that his condition has evidently left him unable to sustain a reciprocal emotional and marital relationship, these obligations don’t mean you have to give up emotional and physical intimacy for the rest of his life. Fidelity, in a situation like yours, involves a duty of care, but with the effective loss of a companion, you’re entitled to care for yourself as well.

The other day, in response to the British Medical Association requiring doctors to participate in VSED (voluntary stop eating and drinking) suicides, I wrote that “suicide nihilism is exerting an ever-increasing gravitational force.” With this post, I double down on that depressing conclusion.

Hospice was designed to care for people who are diagnosed with terminal illnesses until their natural deaths. But a study just published in the Journal of Pain and Symptom Management — the publication of the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine — argues that people intending to commit suicide via VSED should qualify for hospice care even if they are not otherwise dying!

What? Why? Because someone dying within six months qualifies for hospice. VSED takes less than that amount of time to die. Hence, such suicidal people should be admitted to hospice. The mind just boggles.

The subtitle of the revised and updated version of my book criticizing utilitarian bioethics, Culture of Death, is, “The Age of ‘Do Harm’ Medicine.” Helping patients kill themselves by self-starvation and dehydration — known in euthanasia parlance as VSED (for voluntary stopping eating and drinking) — certainly fits that designation.

Two major medical associations now have endorsed doctors assisting in such suicides by palliating the painful symptoms to help patients go all the way to death. The first was the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine (AAHPM) in 2023. This is especially notable because the organization shamefully went “neutral” on the legalization of assisted suicide, despite that action being the antithesis of the hospice philosophy enunciated by the great medical humanitarian Dame Cecily Saunders. The AAHPM’s journal also published a piece recently endorsing intentionally undernourishing dementia patients under certain conditions (MCF, or “minimal comfort feeding”) — VSED in slow motion, if you will.

Now, another “do harm” shoe has dropped. The British Medical Association has issued an ethical guidance that requires practitioners to participate in VSED when asked to do so by a patient. While the AAHPM guidance assumes that the act will only be done by terminally ill or seriously ill or disabled patients, the BMA guidance notably acknowledges that even those not in ill health can kill themselves in this slow manner — and that doctors must further the suicide palliatively. From the guidance (my emphasis):

The New England Journal of Medicine still publishes objective scientific articles. But in the last decade-plus, it is just as notable for its hard left political opinion pieces about issues ranging from climate change, to race relations, to promoting “equity” (as distinguished from equality), to gun control, to supporting transitioning gender-dysphoric minors, and more.

Debra Malina, Ph.D., the first and so far, only “Perspectives” editor — an opinion section where most of the woke political screeds published by the NEJM are placed — is retiring. She has written a swan song piece taking credit for bringing blatant politics to the pages of the NEJM.

Malina writes that when she took the job, she had been hoping to obtain a tenured university position in English literature. Well, that explains a lot, doesn’t it? Then, she brags about politicizing the Perspectives section:

The nature rights movement continues to advance into respectability with woefully insufficient resistance. Too many people don’t take the threat seriously because they consider it too crazy to be real.

But the sheer nuttiness of the campaign isn’t the only reason for the movement’s continuing successes. Nature rights activists seem nice. They are not verbal bomb throwers. Rather, they deploy passive language to sell radical environmental and anti-free-market agendas. That seeming mildness sedates some people into wrongly thinking that nature rights is not an acute threat to human liberty and flourishing.

A just published puff-piece interview published by The Water Diplomat with Dutch human and nature rights lawyer Jan van de Venis illustrates this tactic. Let’s take a look.