Wesley J. Smith

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.

JAMA Pediatrics has published a depressing study that shows that girls ages 10–14 have caught up with boys of that age when it comes to suicide rates: In 2017, the suicide rate of 10-to-14-year-old boys was twice that of girls (male-female ratio=1.98). By 2024, however, the suicide rate among boys was only 4% higher than that among girls in this age group (ratio=1.04). Gender disparities in suicide trends since 2018 appear to be responsible for the narrowing gap, as the suicide rate for boys decreased by 35% from 2018 to 2024 while the suicide rate for girls increased 13%. From 2007 to 2024, the suicide rate for 10-to 14-year-old girls [per 100,000] more than quadrupled (from 0.51 to 2.28) while the suicide rate Read More ›

The New York Times published an unbelievably puffy piece about a new assisted-suicide clinic starting in New York as legalization kicks in, describing it oh, so objectively as “a start-up for better deaths” — complete with Buddhist chanting. Good grief.

But the saccharine story raises an important issue discussed too little in the debate over assisted suicide. Legalization creates acute financial conflicts of interest that have the potential to push suicidal people toward death.

For socialized systems and government funded health care, killing instead of caring for expensive patients can save a lot of money over time, particularly when the terminal-illness limitation is lifted. Indeed, some advocates argue that saving money is a big part of the point. The Canadian media has even celebrated that potential.

The Jason Arday scandal was a tragedy because it resulted in the death, probably by suicide, of a disturbed man who lied and plagiarized his way to the highest levels of academic celebrity at Cambridge University. Everyone should mourn that outcome.

But too many among the liberal intelligentsia seem intent on conjuring the wrong causes for the mess their own attitudes created. Rather than recognizing the potentially dire individual, institutional, and societal consequences that can result from elevating people beyond their actual capabilities, the editors of Nature instead castigate Cambridge for turning on Arday when his fabulism and egregious academic wrongdoing became undeniable:

Arday’s fate is distressing, and especially so for Black scholars and those from other communities that are under-represented in academic research, many members of which report feeling vulnerable and unsupported at this time. There is systemic racism in academia. It is an unwelcoming place for many who enter it through hardship and struggle, as Arday’s story illustrates. It is not acceptable that these barriers persist. On top of this, scholars from Black and other under-represented communities fear that the intensity of attention Arday faced could one day be focused on them. The question many are asking is: ‘Could I be next?’

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.