Wesley J. Smith

Medical conscience is under sustained assault as doctors are being threatened with societal punishment or professional discipline for refusing to provide controversial but legal interventions such as abortion, euthanasia, and gender transition against their religious or moral beliefs. Now, a British Columbia doctor has been fined $28,100 for refusing to administer puberty blockers to a child based on his religious and moral objections. From the CBC story:

The decision describes Child Q, the 14-year-old at the centre at the decision, as a “brave, sensitive, kind transgender girl.”

It says in late 2020, she came out as transgender and struggled with her mental health as she entered puberty. Ajaero referred her to the B.C. Gender Clinic, where an endocrinologist prescribed Lupron, a medication that pauses puberty.

According to the decision, Child Q describes the day she started the medication as “one of the best days of my life.”

Lupron needs to be injected every three to four weeks. It can be injected at home, but according to the decision, Child Q and her family preferred to have it done by a doctor.

Her first appointment to get an injection at her family doctor’s was March 5.

The decision said when Ajaero learned that the shot was Lupron, he told Child Q’s mother he would not be administering it.

“He explained this was for religious and cultural reasons, and he hoped that was OK. Mother Q said it was not OK.”

Ajaero’s charting notes from the appointment said: “I noticed that the injection is for gender re-assignment as patient is already in the waiting room with [her] mother. I called mother into the room and explained to her that I would not be able to give the injection. Based on my religious belief and cultural background.”

Environmentalism continues its radical shift from reasonable conservationism to environmentalist earth religion. This growing faith was most recently preached in an op-ed published by the New York Times that quite literally proselytizes for nature animism.

Robert Moor, a self-described “Thoreauvian” nature writer and the author of In Trees, describes moving from New York City to the forests of British Columbia. He has not had the sylvan experience for which he hoped. After about a week of smoky air caused by annually recurring forest fires, the once “bone deep atheist” experiences a “baptism by wildfire,” a “religious conversion” into a neo-pagan faith called “scientific animism.” From “Our Forests Are Demanding a Sacrifice“:

In these moments, I stop seeing the sky as a blank backdrop. I see it as a living thing, and an angry one. I see the spirit of the forest rising up, rageful and trickstery, to hurl down thunderbolts and sicken us while we sleep. Put differently, I feel myself drawn away from scientific atheism, and toward a creed that philosophers call “scientific animism.”

Animism, put very simply, is the belief that the natural world is inhabited by spirits who can either punish us or bestow favors. Scientific animism applies this ancient lens to modern science, showing how forces in the natural world (plants, rivers, entire planets) are self-organized, self-perpetuating and self-willed. In this view, nature is not an inert, passive backdrop to human progress. It actively responds to our actions — though not always in the way we would predict.

King Cove is an Aleut Alaskan fishing village of about 400 people. It is adjacent to the 300,000-acre Izembek National Wildlife Refuge, which was designated a wilderness area in 1980.

This presented a lethal problem for the people of King Cove. The nearest full-service hospital is in Anchorage, 900 miles away. The town does not have an all-weather airport, meaning that very ill or badly injured people are unable to get to Anchorage during inclement weather.

A town called Cold Bay — only 20 miles away — does have an all-weather airport, so the people of King Cove came up with a commonsense solution, first proposed in 1997: Build a simple, one-lane gravel road through the Izembek National Wildlife refuge to Cold Bay so that those who need urgent care can be driven to the airport there. The proposed evacuation road would require only about 450 of the 330,000 acres in the wilderness zone, and any impact on the refuge would be de minimis. Later, to sweeten the pot, King Cove offered a land swap that would add ecologically delicate wetlands to the Izembek Refuge in return for the road.

Euthanasia has become a way of life in Canada (he wrote ironically). More than 100,000 people have been killed by doctors and nurse practitioners. At least one hospice lost funding for refusing to kill patients. Doctors with religious and moral objections were told by Ontario’s highest court to either kill qualified patients wanting to die, procure a doctor who will (“effective referral”), or get out of medicine. Euthanasia has been described in the media as a splendid source of organs. And there are horror stories aplenty. Here’s the latest. If the reporting is accurate, an elderly woman with stomach cancer was euthanized after being coaxed by medical personnel and while mentally incapable. From the Daily Mail story: Two days before Read More ›

We live in irrational times epitomized by the “rights of nature” (RoN) movement that seeks to grant human-type rights to various aspects of the natural world, including geological features.

Alas, the movement is succeeding. Rivers have been granted rights, such as the right to flow (so much for flood control and hydroelectricity projects). Glaciers have been granted rights. A mountain in New Zealand has rights. The waves in a Spanish bay have rights. Copper mining was stopped in Panama because of the supposed right of the earth to keep its own ore. In the U.S., Canada, and the UK, various municipalities have granted rights to nature, lakes, water, and trees. There is a radical bill pending in the English Parliament to grant rights to nature.

The most recent iteration of this nonsense sees arctic ice as having “agency” and therefore entitled to rights. An academic journal article started the sea-ice-rights advocacy ball rolling last year. From “Toward Rights of Sea Ice” (citations omitted):

Importantly, RoN hold the potential for the integration of a new ethical approach for Arctic sea ice, providing a promising perspective that emphasizes relationships, interdependence, and the well-being of all entities. The latter may have both conceptual and normative implications on the current legal treatment of Arctic sea ice, both of which may unfold in different manners. Conceptually, the ethics inherently embedded in RoN fosters a nurturing and reciprocal relationship with nature and the more-than-human and thus the Arctic environment as a whole.

Assisted suicide/euthanasia legalization is spreading like a stain. But with most doctors refusing to participate, how do we ensure that people who want to die are indeed made dead?

Answer: Blatant coercion.

Usually, the attacks on “medical conscience” (as it is known) involves threatening refusing doctors’ professional licenses. The medical literature is rife with such advocacy by bioethics notables like Ezekiel Emanuel, Julian Savulescu, and Peter Singer, who argue that doctors either participate in requested legal medical procedures — even if morally opposed — or face processional discipline. If doctors don’t like it, these activists argue, they should get out of medicine.

Some doctors have already faced the music over such refusals. In Australia a doctor was disciplined for refusing a sex-selection abortion. Ontario, Canada, courts have ruled that doctors must either euthanize legally qualified patients or tender an “effective referral,” i.e., procure another doctor for the patient the refusing MD knows will provide the lethal jab — in other words: forced complicity.

Now in Italy, the next shoe has dropped. Doctors who refused to participate in the assisted suicide are under criminal investigation.

The long wait for organs threatens the ethics of transplant medicine, with some bioethicists calling for the end of the dead donor rule — allowing “death by organ donation” — while a few have gone so far as to argue that cloned fetuses be gestated in artificial wombs for that purpose when the technology is perfected. But an ethical means of easing a very real problem is advancing exponentially — using genetically modified pig organs. Toward that end, early xenotransplantation experiments are already being conducted. A recent success saw a pig kidney last for 217 days in a man with kidney failure, which kept him alive until a human organ could be transplanted: A man has been given a genetically Read More ›

The other week, I discussed a Nature editorial advocating that scientists be required to “register” with the state. That policy, if enacted, would be a step toward establishing a technocratic rule-by-experts system by controlling what would be acceptable scientific discourse and who would be authorized to communicate about such matters. A new proposal, also in Nature, would push the West toward technocracy. The science journal just published a piece urging the U.N. to establish a panel of scientists — the International Panel on Inequality (IPI) — to determine policies involving income and wealth inequality. From “Why We Need an International Panel on Inequality:” The consequences [of wealth disparities] are well established. A growing body of research links higher income inequality Read More ›

You may not have heard, but today is the annual World Suicide Prevention Day. Usually, such efforts are almost invisible. We don’t put nearly as much emphasis on suicide prevention as we once did. I am all for suicide prevention, of course. I just wish that those efforts included assisted suicide/euthanasia, which costs the lives of approximately 25,000 people annually around the world — with that toll increasing every year. But despite proliferating laws allowing doctors and nurse practitioners to assisted suicides — or, as in Canada, Netherlands, Belgium, New Zealand, and other countries — actively kill suicidal people, prevention efforts are generally silent about this category of suicide. I checked on the World Health Organization link to Prevention Day Read More ›

My mother died of Alzheimer’s disease at the ripe old age of 99. With invaluable help from hospice, my wife and I cared for her in our home for the last five months of her life.

Was it difficult? Very. Does that matter? No. Mom deserved the best care available regardless of her mental incapacity.

My mother’s brother also died of Alzheimer’s. He received excellent care in the memory unit of a Baptist-affiliated assisted living facility for the last years of his life.

Was it difficult? Very. Does that matter? No. My uncle deserved the best care available regardless of his mental incapacity.

The compassionate support my mother and uncle received was once the expected moral standard. Unfortunately, that seems to be changing. Increasingly, dementia patients are viewed by many as better off dead sooner rather than later.