Euthanasia

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 ›

Wesley J. Smith was on EpochTV’s American Thought Leaders this week in an episode dedicated to exploring the history and dangers of the assisted suicide movement. From EpochTV: “When a country or a state legalizes assisted suicide or euthanasia, it can no longer call itself anti-suicide, because it specifically approves some suicides. … It’s a very dangerous movement that is normalizing this kind of approach to dying as opposed to natural death.” In this episode, I sit down with Wesley J. Smith, a lawyer, public speaker, award-winning author, and chair of the Discovery Institute Center on Human Exceptionalism. “We’re seeing in Canada also the beginning of a situation where patients who have a tough time getting an oncologist because of Read More ›

The great anti-euthanasia warrior, Rita Marker, has died at 83 after a long illness. Rita was in Europe in the mid 1980s and, out of curiosity, attended an international right-to-die convention. She was so alarmed by what she heard, she and her late husband and soulmate Mike Marker, formed the nonprofit International Anti-Euthanasia Task Force (later renamed the Patients Rights Council). Along with a loyal staff, Rita began decades of work pushing against that dark agenda. Not every great public-policy activist becomes a household name. Rita wasn’t interested in notoriety or fame. Effectiveness was her lodestar, that and personal sacrifice. For as long as she was physically able, she gave all she had to the cause. Rita had stage fright, Read More ›

Alabama just executed its second murderer by nitrogen. It was reportedly not pleasant: Alan Eugene Miller, 59, was pronounced dead at a south Alabama prison. He shook and trembled on the gurney for about two minutes with his body at times pulling against the restraints. That was followed by about six minutes of gasping breathing. And yet, we are told that suicide by nitrogen in the suicide pod is peaceful and dignified. So, which is it? This is another example of what I call cruel and unusual death with dignity.

Back in 1993, my first anti-euthanasia piece, published in Newsweek, warned that if we legalized assisted suicide, organ harvesting would eventually be included as a “plum to society.” “Alarmist!” my hate mail screeched. “Slippery slope fallacy!” etc. Even those who agreed with my overall critique assured me it would never come to pass. And yet it did. Conjoining organ harvesting with euthanasia is now deemed so respectable it is even boosted at the highest levels of the medical establishment. JAMA Surgery just assured us that kidneys harvested from patients killed in hospitals — as happens in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Canada — work better and sooner. And remember, many of these killed donors were not terminally ill. “Kidney Transplant Outcomes Following Donation After Euthanasia” Read More ›

The ghoulish Australian “doctor” Philip Nitschke has long been obsessed with making suicide readily available to anyone who wants to die. Indeed, years ago, he told NRO’s Kathryn Jean Lopez that he wanted what he called “peaceful” suicide pills sold in supermarkets, even to “troubled teens.” Nitschke also sold plastic suicide bags in Australia (which I helped cause to be outlawed when I busted him for his ghoulishness in the national media there in 2001). Subsequently, he traveled the world teaching how-to-commit-suicide classes and starred at international death-movement conventions. Awful. More recently, Nitschke made world headlines in the assisted-suicide-boosting media for inventing a “suicide capsule” that asphyxiates the suicidal person with nitrogen. At first, Swiss authorities said it would be legal, and then they backtracked. Legal or Read More ›

Suicide is at a crisis level in the United States and around the world. According to the World Health Organization, more than 700,000 people committed suicide in 2019. In 2022, there were 49,476 self-inflicted deaths in the U.S. alone, or 14.2 per 100,000 people.

At the same time, assisted-suicide activism enjoys ever higher visibility, continually promoted in the media and popular culture as the best way to “die with dignity,” resulting in an increasing toll. Each year, well over 20,000 people around the world die by assisted suicide or euthanasia — which are generally not included in suicide statistics.

It is into this disturbing and paradoxical paradigm that The Lancet Public Health medical journal devoted an entire issue to suicide prevention. This should have been a welcome boost to saving lives. Instead, the mostly facile articles focus substantially on expanding government and promoting liberal policies as the best means of reducing suicides. Indeed, taken as a whole, the edition reflects the latest trend in medical-journal advocacy to transform political controversies — i.e., climate change, racism, and the like — into public-health crises to enable increased regulation and the imposition of left-wing public policies.

That is not to say that public health doesn’t have a significant role to play in suicide prevention. Of course it does. But the authors advocate shifting primary responsibility for suicide prevention from normal public-health activities and patient-centered clinical settings to an “all population approach” in which “all parts of government” will be “accountable” for the “social and commercial determinants of suicide risk.” In other words, everything government plans and executes would become ultimately about suicide prevention.