euthanasia

I always enjoy Kathryn Lopez’s ongoing Corner feature in which she posts about news stories that “caught my eye.” So I decided to blatantly steal the concept to discuss euthanasia/assisted suicide stories that have recently been in the news.

1. A Spanish father lost a legal case to prevent his daughter’s euthanasia. The young woman, who has a severe mental illness, tried to commit suicide previously by jumping off a building, leaving her with paraplegia. A court has now decided, in a bitter irony, that due to her disability, doctors can finish what she started. Awful.
2. Euthanasia killings in the Netherlands increased by 10 percent between 2023 and 2024, with nearly 10,000 killed by doctors in one year. Lethal jabs for the mentally ill also increased to 219, and 427 dementia patients. There were also 54 reported cases of simultaneous euthanasia deaths of family members. The report doesn’t say how many of these people were organ-harvested.
3. Nearly 4,000 Belgians were euthanized in 2024. According to the Brussels Times, “The vast majority of patients experienced both physical and psychological suffering (82%). Just under 16% experienced only physical pain and 1.9% psychological suffering.” Belgium was also a euthanasia tourism destination, with 120 people traveling to Belgium from other countries to be killed.

For those who may not remember, Terri Schiavo was a profoundly cognitively disabled woman who became the subject of a legal and cultural battle that made international headlines. The case became a bitter and protracted conflict between Michael Schiavo, Terri’s husband who wanted to pull her feeding tube, and the Schindler family that fought to save their child and sister’s Read More ›

Wesley J. Smith joined host Simon O’Connor on Family Matters, a show from Family First New Zealand, to discuss human exceptionalism. Together, they discuss what makes humans different from animals, the problem with mainstream bioethics today, why euthanasia is wrong, and more!

Switzerland is the world’s suicide tourism capital. Indeed, for the price of transportation and about $11,000, you can be helped to make yourself dead at one of the country’s notorious suicide clinics. Assisted suicide is legal in Switzerland if not done for a “selfish” purpose and if the soon-to-be-dead person has decisional capacity. (Why charging more than $10,000 to help make one dead isn’t considered “selfish” is beyond me, because it sure ain’t altruistic!) It used to be that each such assisted suicide had to be at least cursorily investigated by the authorities. But now, that minimal protection has been gutted in one canton and the costs of what’s left of oversight passed on to the suicidal deceased. From the Swissinfo.ch story: Read More ›

I previously wrote about pending Oregon and Vermont legislation to do away with the requirement that only doctors be allowed to legally assist suicides. Now, it’s Washington’s turn, with a proposal to allow “qualified medical providers” to prescribe poison, defined as a licensed physician, physician’s assistant, or advanced practice registered nurse. I previously opined about why I think this is a very bad idea, so I won’t belabor the points further. The Washington bill also speeds up the waiting period between the first and second request for poison pills for some suicidal patients: Notwithstanding subsection (1) of this section, if, at the time of the qualified patient’s initial oral request in subsection (1) of this section, the attending qualified medical Read More ›

Yesterday, I posted about a Vermont bill that would allow nondoctors to prescribe death. I found out today that Oregon has similar legislation pending that would allow “providers” to lethally prescribe. SB 1003 specifies that “provider” can mean a licensed physician, a licensed physician assistant, or a licensed nurse practitioner. I wouldn’t trust a PA or NP to diagnose me with six months to live. Would you? That is not a putdown. These valuable medical professionals’ primary roles are to provide generalized care, monitor and manage chronic conditions, and provide wellness services. But they are not physicians. They receive less education and specialized training as compared with physician-certified specialists like cardiologists, oncologists, nephrologists, or neurologists. I suspect that the reason for expanding categories of eligible lethal Read More ›

Pro-assisted-suicide activists like to say the unethical act is legal in Montana. Strictly speaking, that isn’t true. Some years ago, a muddled Montana supreme court ruling refused to create a state constitutional right to assisted suicide as requested by activists because the Montana constitution’s legislative history made it clear that the court couldn’t. But wanting to legalize it anyway, the judges declared somehow that assisted suicide wasn’t against public policy of the state and that consent to such an act was a defense to a criminal charge.

Montana has been in that muddled legal state ever since, with attempts to either explicitly legalize or criminalize assisted suicide unable to get to the governor’s desk.

Now, the Montana senate has moved the anti-assisted-suicide agenda forward, passing a simple bill that would declare consent to assisted suicide unavailable as a defense by making assisted suicide contrary to Montana public policy. 

Moves are afoot in bioethics to require caregivers to withhold food and water by mouth from a patient made incompetent by dementia if that patient, while compos mentis, has signed such a request — and even if the patient willingly eats, enjoys meals, or asks for food. It is sometimes called “voluntary stop eating and drinking [VSED] by advance directive,” in the parlance.

I have frequently criticized VSED by directive as inhumane to the patient, cruel to caregivers (as it forces them to starve people to death), and designed to open the door to lethally jabbing those with advanced dementia as the less onerous alternative to their being made to starve to death.

Now, as supposedly some form of compromise, there is a proposal on the table to barely feed — i.e., malnourish — dementia patients who have previously signed such a directive. From, “Mr. Smith Has No Mealtimes,” published in the Journal of Pain and Symptom Management (citations omitted):

Minimal Comfort Feeding (MCF)…is the provision of only enough oral nutrition and hydration to ensure comfort. With MCF, eating and drinking is not scheduled; rather, caretakers offer food and liquids only in response to signs of hunger and thirst. Patients are neither wakened for regular mealtimes nor encouraged to eat or drink. Instead, they are offered frequent, fastidious mouth care, continued social contact, therapeutic touch, sensory distraction, and medications to relieve distress associated with apparent thirst or hunger before being provided with minimal amounts of liquid or food.

What a debacle. More than 15,000 people died in Canada in one year because they couldn’t access care in the country’s collapsing socialized health-care system. From the Toronto Sun story: Close to 15,500 people died waiting for health care in Canada between April 1, 2023 until March 31, 2024, according to data compiled by SecondStreet.org via Freedom to Information Act requests across the country. However, SecondStreet.org says the exact number of 15,474 is incomplete as Quebec, Alberta, Newfoundland and Labrador don’t track the problem and Saskatchewan and Nova Scotia only provided data on patients who died while waiting for surgeries — not diagnostic scans. SecondStreet.org says if it extrapolates the unknown data, then an estimated 28,077 patients died last year Read More ›