The primary purpose of SB 917 is to prevent unilateral forced withdrawals—over the objection of patients and/or families—of wanted life-extending treatment based on doctors’ beliefs about the quality of the patient’s life. Read More ›
The media love to boost assisted suicide. They laud people who commit it — witness their swoon over the late Brittany Maynard — and the doctors who are willing to lethally prescribe or give lethal injections. Read More ›
Euthanasia homicide is conjoined with organ harvesting in at least three countries — Canada, the Netherlands, and Belgium. In the latter two, the donors who are killed are sometimes mentally ill, not physically sick. Or, they might be disabled. Read More ›
When activists successfully legalized assisted suicide in California, they persuaded the California Medical Association to shift from opposition to neutrality with the promise that no doctor would be forced to participate. But here’s the thing with assisted suicide: Such promises are made to be broken. Read More ›
Always remember that the first iteration of assisted-suicide legalization is not the last iteration. Over time — and once people get used to doctors prescribing for suicide or giving lethal jabs — the laws are loosened to make more people eligible to die, or to expand the cadre of medical professionals entitled to end patient’s lives. Read More ›
The push is on in Canada to normalize euthanasia as the best way to die — to save money and emotional turmoil. How hard is the push? Reader’s Digest Canada — no less — has published a guide to end-of-life planning that pushes euthanasia and doesn’t even mention hospice. Read More ›
I have written here before about Delta Hospice in British Columbia, which has been under unremitting pressure by the government of the province — including a funding cutoff — only because it refuses to participate in euthanasia. It is now being forced to lay off clinical workers and faces eviction. Read More ›
The West is tearing itself apart. The symptoms are evident in our bitterly divided politics and the attempts to punish those with heterodox views. Read More ›
A bit ago, Germany’s high court created an absolute right to commit suicide and the concomitant right to have help in making oneself dead. Now, an Austrian court has said that committing suicide is a right of “self determination” and that obtaining help is part of that right. Read More ›