euthanasia

When assisted suicide is first proposed for legalization, we are assured by death activists that strict guidelines will protect against abuse. But they don’t mean it. Once the laws pass, the supposed protections — which are always flaccid to begin with — are soon redefined by activists and the media as “barriers,” et voila, the laws are soon loosened. It’s all a con, but people seem to fall for it every time.

This pattern can be seen vividly playing out in Victoria, Australia. The state was the first in that country to legalize assisted suicide, and now the government is making more people eligible for legally hastened death. From the premier’s announcement:

The new legislation will remove unnecessary barriers to accessing VAD, improve clarity for practitioners, strengthen safety measurements and make the system fairer and more compassionate.

See what I mean? “Strengthen safety,” (!!!) and “fairer and more compassionate,” really just means more people can become dead much sooner.

Public-advocacy-focused secular bioethics is largely progressive politics covered with a veneer of expertise. While there are certainly university courses and degrees in the field, no bioethicist is licensed as such. Indeed, the entire discourse is purely subjective. It is driven mostly by philosophers, professors, doctors, and lawyers who opine about a particular set of issues, your faithful correspondent included.

But now, members of the tribe apparently want to pretend that secular bioethics has become such a deeply ingrained part of our societal bedrock that it qualifies as a moral tradition. From, “Bioethics as an Emerging Moral Tradition and Some Implications for Adversarial Cooperation,” published in the influential Journal of Medical Ethics (citations omitted):

In a forthcoming book titled The Emerging Tradition of Secular Bioethics,…we focus on whether the field of bioethics in the pluralistic and increasingly polarised American context can give justified moral guidance in foundational, clinical, research and public health domains. We argue against a proceduralistic account of bioethics that limits the field to analysing moral problems and clarifying key concepts but never offering substantive moral guidance. We also reject an Enlightenment account of bioethics based on universal, neutral and abstract rational standards and moral first principles that are undeniable by any reasonable person and that can (in theory) eliminate all fundamental moral disagreements. Rather, we argue that while once naming a discourse through which various historically embedded moral traditions could discuss ethical challenges, bioethics is now an emerging content-full moral tradition in its own right.

Notice that the entire premise excludes the moral influence of religion — which is a much deeper tradition with a far longer history — even though one of the founding fathers of bioethics was the great Christian theologian Paul Ramsey. Moreover, some of the most vibrant minds arguing against contemporary mainstream views — such as the astute Catholic bioethicist Charles Camosy (among many others) — would seem, by definition, to be excluded from the supposed “moral tradition” because their principles are profoundly influenced by faith. (For those who would applaud, please recall that eugenics was a progressive secular policy resisted most vociferously by the Catholic Church.)

Once we decided that killing is an acceptable answer to suffering, the kind of suffering that qualifies us to be made dead continually expands. Now, an elderly British couple have committed joint assisted suicide at a Swiss termination clinic to avoid future widowhood and increasing fragility — in other words, to eliminate future suffering. From the Daily Record story: A devoted couple who “couldn’t bear to be apart” have died together at a Swiss assisted dying clinic after sending emails to their relatives to let them know. Neither Michael Posner, 97, nor his wife Ruth, 96, had a terminal illness, but had made the decision to die together because they were desperate not to be apart after 75 years of Read More ›

I have always believed that liberals should be leading opponents of assisted suicide. After all, two of the core tenets of liberalism are (supposed to be) protecting vulnerable people from exploitation and promoting equality among all people. But other than disability-rights activists, most liberals tend to support legalization based on “choice.” Mega author J.K. Rowling, of Harry Potter fame, is definitely a political liberal. Indeed, her activism pushing against gender ideology is founded in protecting children and securing women’s private spaces. Now, with legalization having passed the U.K. House of Commons and the bill now being debated in the House of Lords, she has come out in opposition to state-sanctioned assisted suicide. From The Lion story: Author J.K. Rowling has Read More ›

I understand that people are terrified of dementia. Believe me, I get it. My mother died of Alzheimer’s. But I can’t wrap my head around the fact that advocacy for killing/suicide as the answer to the difficulties caused by the condition is becoming ubiquitous. Noted bioethicist and lawyer Thaddeus Mason Pope has written an essay, to be published in an edited volume, on this very issue. It lists eleven ways people can “avoid late-stage dementia,” and almost all involve intentionally ending life. Remember when we were told that advance medical directives are the key to not receiving life-extending treatment one does not want? They are, but that’s not good enough for Pope, because it doesn’t guarantee death: This strategy is Read More ›

ALS is a catastrophic terminal disease that, within a few years of diagnosis (the physicist Stephen Hawking was an exception), eventually causes total paralysis. It is also a tragic condition that euthanasia/assisted suicide activists zealously wield to justify killing as an acceptable answer to suffering.

Now, the understandable fear of ALS is being deployed by academic advocates as a means of breaking the (U.S.) requirement for a six-month terminal diagnosis and self-administration in assisted suicide.

In jurisdictions where MAiD [the euphemism for assisted suicide that seeks to turn life-ending it into a medical “treatment”]is legally available, such laws are intended to support patient autonomy and alleviate suffering. However, for patients with ALS, the clinical reality of progressive paralysis combined with legal requirements for self-administration of lethal medication creates a cruel dilemma. Approximately one-third of affected individuals express interest in MAiD if their suffering becomes intolerable [12], yet current laws require that it be initiated while patients retain the physical ability to self-administer the prescribed medication.

However, patients are not legally eligible to access MAiD until it is determined they have a life expectancy of six months or less. This creates a narrow and clinically unrealistic window where waiting until they meet legal eligibility may mean they are no longer physically capable of completing the required act, regardless of prognosis, suffering, or intent.

People sometimes tell me that nothing can be more extreme than the transgender craze. I disagree. The next step is already in sight, what is sometimes called “transableism.” Transableism is an advocacy term for a mental illness known as Body Identity Integrity Disorder (BIID). People with the condition anguish that they were born with body parts or capacities that they should not have. This may express as an obsession to become an amputee or paraplegic, as just two examples. Here is an extreme case from the U.K. as reported by the Daily Mail: A surgeon with a “sexual obsession” for cutting off parts of his body had his own legs amputated as part of an insurance scam, officials in the UK said Read More ›

An article in the Daily Mail sounds the alarm that permitting infant euthanasia — i.e., infanticide — is under serious consideration in Canada: Canada‘s assisted suicide laws have continued rapidly expanding in recent years, with a group of doctors now pushing for disabled newborn babies to be euthanized.…As assisted deaths have become a major part of Canada’s health care system, the Quebec College of Physicians suggested legalizing euthanasia for infants born severely ill. Canada has jumped so enthusiastically into the euthanasia abyss that I have little doubt that infanticide will eventually be allowed there. It’s only logical. If killing is an acceptable answer to suffering, why limit the killing to adults? Besides, as the story briefly notes, the Netherlands already Read More ›

Legalizing euthanasia/assisted suicide, abortion, and transgender interventions for dysphoric children is only the beginning of the ongoing destruction of Hippocratic moral values in medicine. Once such interventions are legal, activists next insist that they become readily available. But many (and I hope most) doctors want nothing to do with causing death or interfering with the normal functioning of healthy bodies. Indeed, many assisted suicide, abortion, and gender ideologues complain that too few doctors willingly participate in these procedures, as is sometimes protected by the law. These “medical conscience” rights inhibit the increasing hegemony of utilitarian medical values in health care. As a result, once life-taking or mutilating procedures become legal, efforts soon begin to conscript unwilling medical professionals into performing Read More ›

Wesley J. Smith recently participated in a Symposium hosted by the Human Life Review. He was asked to react to the following statement: In the decades between Roe v. Wade and Dobbs, most prolifers believed that Americans were more or less opposed to legalized abortion on demand because a) this was the case in 1973; b) it was imposed on us from above by “raw judicial power,” rather than legislated; and c) surveys repeatedly showed substantial percentages of Americans being disquieted by abortion, especially when you got beyond the hard cases and the earliest weeks of pregnancy. In the first year or so following Dobbs, prolifers got a reality check through legislative defeats even in some reddish and purple states. We can say (what is true) that massive Read More ›