Wesley J. Smith

Assisted suicide advocates will say anything in the cause of transforming suicide into a medical treatment. Barbara Coombs Lee, head of the country’s most influential assisted suicide organization Compassion and Choices (formerly Hemlock Society), writing in the Huffington Post, literally . . . . Continue Reading »

Now that the assisted suicide movement believes it has some winds in its sails, its pretense of being reasonable and measured is collapsing under the ideological zeal that drives the movement.  Case in point: The head of Compassion and Choices, Barbara Coombs Lee, has written an outrageous . . . . Continue Reading »

Pure madness.  Beyond madness, reckless irresponsibility.Let’s say you want to expand access to insurance—which I believe is a laudable goal.  There are very simple ways to do it, without euthanizing a system that for most people is working very well.  You could expand . . . . Continue Reading »

Bizarro was funny today. But Dr. Kenneth Stevens, of Physicians for Compassionate Care, used the cartoon to make an important point about medical conscience clauses in a private e-mail to me (reprinted here with his permission): I think it [the cartoon] ties in with physician conscience. What if . . . . Continue Reading »

Earlier today, I posted this funny Bizarro comic on a SHS feature called “Secondhand Smoke Funnies.”  But Dr. Kenneth Stevens of Physicians for Compassionate Care caught a deeper, if probably unintended, message in the strip that I missed. (Curse you for your greater sagacity, Dr. . . . . Continue Reading »

I have previously discussed the case of a Canadian woman who wishes to accompany her terminally ill husband to Switzerland for a joint assisted suicide—this even though she is not ill. A Canadian assisted suicide activist approved of the plan as a prophylactic against future suffering.Well, . . . . Continue Reading »

Some bioethicists believe we all have a duty to be experimented on. The nature of this duty takes several forms, for example there is a the utilitarian view that we must as individuals subsume our own desires to promote the greater good.  Three bioethicists, writing in JAMA, (G. Owen . . . . Continue Reading »

The Duty to Die goes into effect under Obamacare:PETA’s “Kentucky Fried Cruelty Campaign Doesn’t Seem to be Going Too . . . . Continue Reading »

This article has me queasy. Yes, the writers concede that the moral obligation they seek to establish should not be legally enforceable. Yes, they reject more radical proposals that would require all individuals to sacrifice their individual interests to promote the “greater good.”  . . . . Continue Reading »

A very good opinion piece,written by a physician and bioethicist, Dr. Bob Orr, appeared in the current AM News, which is published by the AMA.  From the column:The right of conscience in medicine generated very little discussion prior to the current generation. In the 1960s and ’70s, . . . . Continue Reading »