euthanasia

Euthanasia has become a way of life in Canada (he wrote ironically). More than 100,000 people have been killed by doctors and nurse practitioners. At least one hospice lost funding for refusing to kill patients. Doctors with religious and moral objections were told by Ontario’s highest court to either kill qualified patients wanting to die, procure a doctor who will (“effective referral”), or get out of medicine. Euthanasia has been described in the media as a splendid source of organs. And there are horror stories aplenty. Here’s the latest. If the reporting is accurate, an elderly woman with stomach cancer was euthanized after being coaxed by medical personnel and while mentally incapable. From the Daily Mail story: Two days before Read More ›

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 ›

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.

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 West continues its love affair with the culture of death as the French National Assembly just voted to legalize euthanasia and assisted suicide, overriding the Senate’s rejection. I haven’t read the bill, but here are a few notes I discerned from various media reports: Please remember that the law as it currently exists will surely not be the permanent ceiling of permissibility, but as other jurisdictions illustrate, merely be the launching pad for an ever more expansive euthanasia regime. Moreover, even these weak-tea parameters will probably not be enforced meaningfully, because that’s how the culture of death rolls. And once euthanasia starts, it picks up steam year by year as hastened death becomes normalized. The constitutionality of the law Read More ›

The legalization of assisted suicide/euthanasia corrupts medical ethics and not just because killing patients or assisting their suicides is a direct violation of the Hippocratic oath. No: Transforming sick and disabled people into a killable caste also objectifies them as potential natural resources to be mined or harvested.

Hastened death and organ-harvesting have already been conjoined in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Spain, the Netherlands, and Belgium. (In the latter two countries, some cases have involved mentally ill patients.) The practice has been supported in prominent medical journals. It is not alarmism to note that the idea is gaining ever wider acceptance among the medical and bioethics intelligentsia.

But killing and then harvesting doesn’t go far enough for some mainstream bioethicists. Where euthanasia is legal, they don’t see why organ procurement can’t also be the means of death for patients who want to donate. In other words, don’t just kill and then harvest; harvest to kill.