euthanasia

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.

The Anglican Church of Canada has authorized clergy to bless people being euthanized just before, during, and after being lethally jabbed (when permitted by the bishop). From “Pastoral Liturgies at the Time of Death in Contexts of Medically Assisted Dying”: It is not our intent to enter into the ethical arguments regarding MAiD, nor to provide a moral argument for or against MAiD.…No matter where people are in their life journey, we as a Christian community and Christian leaders in particular are called to respond pastorally to the needs and concerns of the people before us. Wherever the church serves, we are the Body of Christ reaching out to the suffering, the sick, and the dying. When someone reaches out Read More ›

Serious moves are afoot to allow ending the lives of dementia patients, either by allowing them to be killed by lethal jab euthanasia if requested in a written advance directive (where legal), or to allow a document to be signed requiring caregivers to withhold sufficient food and water to sustain life. New Jersey seems to move subtly in the latter direction with a vaguely worded bill, S.B. 4186, that could open the door to intentional legal undernourishment. From the bill: It is the public policy of this State to respect the dignity, autonomy, and previously expressed wishes of individuals living with dementia by authorizing Dementia-Specific Advance Directives (DSADs), establishing clear standards for “comfort feeding only,” and ensuring that such directives Read More ›

Canada has gone hog wild for euthanasia. But the pro-death tide may — may — be beginning to turn. The province of Alberta just passed a bill that significantly restricts eligibility for euthanasia (medical aid in dying, or MAID), soon to be signed into binding law. The biggest change in Bill 18 ends the eligibility of non-terminally-ill patients to be MAIDed (known as Track 2). Among the provisions of Bill 18 (“Safeguards for Last Resort Termination of Life Act”), as summarized by the government: Eligibility in Alberta to individuals 18 and over with capacity to make their own health care decision whose natural death has been determined by a physician or nurse practitioner as being reasonably foreseeable, also known as Read More ›

The other day, I wrote about Wendy Duffy, a healthy woman in deep grief because of the death of her son, who was planning to die at a Swiss death clinic. Alas, Duffy apparently did the deed. From the New York Post story: The physically healthy British mom, irreparably heartbroken over the death of her only son, died by euthanasia in Switzerland on Friday. Wendy Duffy, 56, died at the Pegasos assisted suicide clinic in Basel, in what the controversial organization called a “sane suicide,” the Daily Mail reported. “I can confirm that Wendy Duffy, at her own request, was assisted to die on April 24 and that the procedure was completed without incident and in full compliance with her Read More ›

A grieving mother who is in good health has been accepted for termination by a Swiss suicide clinic. From the New York Post story: A physically healthy British woman heartbroken over the death of her only son is heading to Switzerland to end her own life at an assisted suicide clinic. Wendy Duffy, 56, attempted to take her own life after her son died four years ago — but is soon bound for Switzerland, where assisted suicide is legal, after her application was accepted by a clinic, according to the London Times. Duffy, a former care worker from the West Midlands, told the Daily Mail that she paid Pegasos, a Swiss assisted-dying nonprofit organization, $13,500 to euthanize herself under its Read More ›

After a bear was euthanized in California because she paw-swiped a human who owned a house under which the bruin and her cubs were living, there was a popular outcry. Now, a bill has been put in the hopper in the California State Senate promoting “coexistence” between people and wild animals. From S.B. 1135:

It is the policy of the state that the management of wildlife shall include an emphasis on the coexistence of humans and wildlife through department-led efforts to reduce, minimize, and mitigate conflicts. These efforts shall also seek to align with the state’s conservation, public safety, environmental planning, and climate adaptation goals and to be accomplished through coordination and cooperation between the department and wildlife coexistence partners.

Here are the details:

Upon appropriation by the Legislature, the department shall establish the Wildlife Coexistence Program to manage and promote wildlife coexistence by conducting all of the following activities:
(a) Managing, tracking, and responding to wildlife conflict calls, reports, and incident responses.
(b) Avoiding, minimizing, and mitigating conflicts between humans and wildlife by proactively and continuously implementing best practices that emphasize effective and ecologically appropriate nonlethal conflict resolution solutions developed using best available science and indigenous knowledge.
(c) Investigating, documenting, and analyzing reported human-wildlife incidents, including, but not limited to, depredation, perceived or actual human-wildlife conflicts, and wildlife health issues.
(d) Maintaining a statewide wildlife incident reporting tool.