Canada’s pending legislation on euthanasia and assisted suicide raises a question: What shall we call people who are legally involved in the destruction of human life—particularly those who do the actual killing? Shall we call them medical executioners? They are indeed executioners, as none can . . . . Continue Reading »
Given the low standards of mainstream reporting on religious issues, it’s hard to publish an article that is truly disappointing, but Slate’s recent piece “Sick and Far From Home” manages to achieve just that. The article, which a Slate press release trumpeted as “a stunning investigatory . . . . Continue Reading »
It would happen the same way every time.A few tough-looking guys would show up on the doorstep of a new business. They came offering “protection services” for a certain fee as a most generous favor to the owner. These services were necessary, it would be explained, because this was a “bad . . . . Continue Reading »
Secularist threats against religious liberty are spreading like a stain. Thus, I was attracted immediately to Bruce Abramson's Mosaic column, How Jews Can Help Christians Live as a Creative Minority.Abramson warns Christians that the space to practice their faith in the way they live is . . . . Continue Reading »
American resistance to midwifery is nonsensical. Continue Reading »
Nearly thirty years ago, I published a book, Abortion and the Private Practice of Medicine, in which I sought to understand what then was already emerging as the settled pattern of access to abortion services around the country. By the 1980s, the present pattern in which abortions are performed in specialized clinics rather than in hospitals or doctors’ offices had been established. Several writers in that decade, the sociologist Kristin Luker and the anthropologist Faye Ginsburg among them, described the politics of abortion clearly dependent on how physicians were delivering those services. Continue Reading »
Can we ever achieve consensus on divisive social issues? The just-concluded session of the Montana Legislature sent Governor Steve Bullock the “Montana Unborn Child Pain and Suffering Prevention Act” (HB 479), which would have set the anesthetization of any unborn child twenty weeks gestation or . . . . Continue Reading »
During World War II, German doctors euthanized disabled babies and adults. As Robert Jay Lifton reported in The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, no one forced these doctors to kill. Many of them believed euthanasia to be a “healing treatment” that ended “unlivable” lives, liberated families from the burden of caregiving, and kept the country from “wasting” scarce resources on the lebensunwertes leben(“life unworthy of life”). Such was the fruit of years of utilitarian indoctrination and the resulting societal acceptance of eugenics ideology.At the time, Netherlander doctors were well aware that German medical ethics had devolved. Thus, when the German commander of the occupation, Arthur Seyss-Inquart (now known as “the Butcher of Holland”), commanded that Dutch medical practices adjust to the German way, Netherlander doctors courageously defied the order. Continue Reading »
On November 1, after posting a Facebook message stating, “Today is the day I have chosen to pass away with dignity in the face of my terminal illness, this terrible brain cancer,” twenty-nine-year-old Brittany Maynard took a lethal dose of barbiturates, prescribed by an Oregon physician, and . . . . Continue Reading »
Wesley J. Smith’s article “The Coming of Medical Martyrdom” highlights a troubling trend in Canada that would see physician’s religious rights sacrificed. But it’s not just in Saskatchewan this is happening.
Continue Reading »
Subscribe
Latest Issue
Support First Things
