assisted suicide

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.

Wesley J. Smith appeared on Ave Maria in the Afternoon with Dr. Marcus Peter to discuss recent attempts by assisted suicide advocates to encourage self-starvation among Alzheimer’s patients. Smith explains what “voluntary stop eating and drinking” (VSED) is, why it’s concerning, and the importance of defending the rights and inherent value of people with Alzheimer’s and dementia. Read, “Alzheimer’s Patients in the Crosshairs of VSED — Suicide by Self-Starvation“

On World Suicide Prevention Day, Wesley J. Smith appeared on In the Market with Janet Parshall to speak about the hypocrisy of suicide prevention organizations ignoring assisted suicide. Smith explained that these organizations only want to help prevent some suicides and that they “want to facilitate and endorse and help with others.” Read, “World Suicide Prevention Day” Hypocrisy

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 ›

On World Suicide Prevention Day, Wesley J. Smith appeared on The Drew Mariani Show to discuss the double standard in many professional organizations that treat suicide in some cases as requiring prevention and in others as requiring assistance (i.e., assisted suicide and euthanasia). Smith recounts how this culture of death has marched through the West. Smith also addresses listener questions and expresses why it is vital that all suicidal ideations be treated with prevention, including those with terminal illnesses. “There’s a deep Nihilism in the West, a deep decadence in the West that we have to get a handle on because it’s dangerous and it causes people to look at suicide in a different way,” says Smith. Read, “‘World Suicide 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.

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.

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 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.