Wesley J. Smith

Previous studies have shown an association between states legalizing assisted suicide and increases in suicide rates for other suicides. Now, pro-euthanasia activists are touting a new study which claims no impact. But the study actually finds a significant impact in the raw numbers. From the study published in the American Journal of Bioethics: 927,929 Suicide deaths were represented in the study. Ten states and the District of Columbia had legalized MAID within the study period. In an univariable analysis, states that legalized MAID differed significantly from non-MAID states with respect to mean monthly suicide rate (non-MAID States: 1.46; MAID states: 1.78; p < 0.0001), as well as several covariates. Oh. But wait, adjustments were made: We constructed geographically-weighted regression models controlling for annualized state-level sociodemographic factors, such Read More ›

The medical establishment continues on its march to irrelevance. In the current edition of The Lancet, a Yale history professor named Timothy Snyder inveighs against what he apparently sees as totalitarianism of contemporary health policies. Frankly, it’s mostly gobbledygook. Take the lede, from “Health and Freedom”: We are free as bodies, or not at all. And so health care is a right, one of the most basic. Huh? Snyder then castigates all of Western civilization as essentially thousands of years of continual tyranny: Plato put us all in a cave. In the darkness of the succeeding two millennia and more, western philosophy has had trouble seeing—and feeling—what needs to be seen and felt. A long history of empire and slavery, from that moment Read More ›

More than 30 U.S. cities have adopted nature rights ordinances, mostly to prevent fracking. And now in the recent election, 57 percent of voters in Everett, Wash., granted rights to a geological feature, specifically, the Snohomish River watershed. From the initiative:

The Snohomish River Watershed possesses the rights to exist, regenerate, and flourish, which shall include the right to naturally recharge, the right to naturally flow, the right to water quality necessary to provide habitat for native plants and animals, the right to provide clean water, and the right to restoration. The Snohomish River Watershed shall also have the right to be free from activities.

This is anti-enterprise — and anti-human — since it waters down (pardon the pun) the crucial legal principle of rights to a ridiculous degree. Indeed, with a river granted rights, we re-dignify rights into a concept that thwarts, rather than protects, human freedom.

The bioethics movement has always had power ambitions beyond wrestling with health policy and medical ethics. Indeed, for years, the mainstreamers have been seeking to interpose themselves into the global-warming controversy.

The Hastings Center — the beating heart of the bioethics establishment — has been leading the charge to so expand the sector’s influence. The center just published a call to arms to fight global warming by a medical ethics professor emeritus, advocating that bioethicists be at the center of the climate-change fray.

After praising the inflation-causing spending of the mendaciously named Inflation Reduction Act as now set in stone — time will tell — the author rallies the bioethicists troops to the great cause. From “Now What? Bioethics and Mitigating Climate Disasters“:

We might well ask: Now what? Is there a way to make a difference over the next four years? And, especially, does bioethics have a role in this effort?

I argue that there is important work ahead and bioethics should be squarely in the middle of it. The work is less in federal policy and more in public persuasion. The role for bioethics is to bring global warming and its catastrophic health consequences into focus as an existential crisis neither party can ignore.

The “nature rights” project — and its ancillaries — keeps advancing, mostly ignored by those who could stop it in its tracks with legislation declaring that only humans and our associations and juridical entities have legal standing in courts or enforceable rights. Now, a “whale rights” project has commenced, pushed pro bono by a big international law firm, Simmons and Simmons. From the Legal Cheek story: These frameworks centre on the concept of a “legal person” — an entity acknowledged as having “standing” within the judicial system. Traditionally, this status has been reserved for humans, community organisations, and corporations. Granting this designation to whales represents a groundbreaking shift, acknowledging the value of non-human life and redefining how the law engages Read More ›

San Francisco was once a conservative city. Oh, sure, it had its bohemian side. The Beats of the ’50s were at home in North Beach, and Harry Bridges, the suspected communist who served for years as head of the longshoremen’s union, had a definite influence. But for the most part, San Francisco was well within the cultural mainstream. Indeed, the city was so staid that the Republican Party’s nominee for mayor won landslides in 1955 and 1959, and the GOP nominated the archconservative Barry Goldwater as its presidential candidate from the Cow Palace in 1964.

Then, San Francisco changed. Radically. In 1964, the University of California, Berkeley, a few miles across the bay, became the center of the “free speech” movement. Civil rights and then militant anti–Vietnam War advocacy found great sympathy. The Haight-Ashbury neighborhood became a hippy haven and the focus of a growing drug culture. The gay-rights movement sprang energetically out of the Castro District, and the once predominately Italian working-class neighborhood was transformed into a radical front of the sexual revolution. By the 1980s, the term “San Francisco values” — wielded by conservatives to describe the cultural and political radicalism of the Bay Area — had turned the city into something of a national joke.

Over the years, policies enacted by the city’s ever more extreme progressive leaders slowly destroyed San Francisco. I lived in and around the city for almost 25 years, starting in 1992, and saw the decline happen in real time. It broke my heart.

It is increasingly clear that there is little scientific basis for administering puberty blockers to gender-dysphoric youth. Consequently, many European countries have now effectively banned their use outside of official studies. Now, the New Zealand Ministry of Health has similarly found that there is a “dearth” of evidence supporting blocking normal adolescence in youngsters who feel that their gender is different from their sex. The New Zealand study reviewed all the literature on the question published before September 30, 2023. In other words, it was a study of the findings of published studies. First, it found that studies claiming that puberty blockers helped ease depression were of very poor quality. From “Impact of Puberty Blockers in Gender-Dysphoric Adolescents” (my emphasis): Impact of puberty blockers on Read More ›

A doctor named Katherine A. Koh — who treats homeless people with Harvard Medical School’s Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program — cares deeply about her patients. But her policy prescriptions to help them become the formerly homeless will just keep the ongoing catastrophe rolling along. In the New England Journal of Medicine, she tells of the tragic death of one of her patients and the indifference of society to the tragedy. From “Invisible Deaths: Mortality Among People Experiencing Homelessness“: Jack died on a street corner. A larger-than-life figure, he stood more than 6 ft, 4 in. tall, exuded charismatic energy, and embraced the role of “king of the streets.” Then, at 49, he died without warning on a Read More ›

Why do you oppose euthanasia, Wesley? If people want to die, we should help them die. No. And here’s an individual example explaining just one reason why. A deeply depressed woman was about to be lethally injected in the Netherlands — but changed her mind just in the nick of time. From the New York Post story: Romy, 22, who suffered from clinical depression, eating disorders, and anorexia due to childhood abuse, made the heartbreaking decision to end her life in accordance with legislation in the Netherlands, which allows for euthanasia under certain circumstances. She decided not to go ahead with it at the very last moment. After turning 18, Romy campaigned for four years for her right to die via voluntary assisted dying Read More ›