Wesley J. Smith

American suicide rates are increasing. From the story:The rate of suicide in the United States is increasing for the first time in a decade, according to a new report from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Center for Injury Research and Policy. The increase in the overall . . . . Continue Reading »

Some organ transplant doctors and ethicists continue their campaign to get the people to accept killing for organs. This time the scene is Australia. A transplant physician now says that brain death can’t be known, nor heart death. The answer, obviously, is to kill for organs. From the story: . . . . Continue Reading »

Animal rights types sometimes get so lost in their hyper romanticism about animals they lose touch with reality. This is happening now in Canada in the aftermath of a man killing a bear in self defense. The bear’s cubs subsequently were euthanized. From the story: A B.C. [British Columbia] man . . . . Continue Reading »

A new law out of the Australian state of Victoria must be discussed. First, it permits abortion through the ninth month, meaning that viable babies are subject to being killed, which is to say it gets close to the land of infanticide. Second, it requires all doctors to either do abortions, or if . . . . Continue Reading »

The grieving parents of the late Daniel James, who became suicidal after becoming paralyzed from an injury sustained playing rugby, and who committed assisted suicide in Switzerland after being taken there by his parents for that purpose, have said that no one can judge their son. From the . . . . Continue Reading »

Boy, I get accused of being hard on bioethics, but Michael Cook, the creator of Bioedge, has topped me. He blew his top, finally sick and tired of the rush at prestige universities to reward the most radical bioethicists with big dollars (or pounds), the more radical the better.We all know about . . . . Continue Reading »

This is how the culture of death moves toward cultural hegemony: The first step is to claim that killing (which is descriptive and accurate in that it means “to end life”) will be reserved for the very rare case. But as soon as that premise is accepted, the acceptable category of . . . . Continue Reading »

President Bush’s use of federal funding restrictions to induce creative thinking into ethical ways of deriving pluripotent stem cells continues to be a major triumph, in my opinion, with the astonishing progress that continues to be made in adult stem cell and IPSC research—not that the . . . . Continue Reading »

This is hardly surprising: Hawaii has had to drop its universal health plan for children because people who could afford to insure their children decided instead to let the state assume their responsibility. From the story:Hawaii is dropping the only state universal child health care program in the . . . . Continue Reading »

I am having trouble keeping up: Every day now almost, it is one once unthinkable thing after another.In the UK, a woman tried to commit suicide by swallowing anti-freeze, and doctors refused to save her! From the story:A young woman who attempted suicide was allowed to die because hospital staff . . . . Continue Reading »