Free Republic

The history of human knowledge as it relates to the human body is a fascinating and terrible thing. In every age, the ability for physicians and other medical practitioners to effectively treat wounds or combat disease has been constrained by the technology – or lack thereof – available at the time. In the past, people often died from illnesses or injuries that are quite treatable today. Over the centuries, we’ve come a long way. Our understanding of human physiology and biology has enabled us to improve quality of life and extend life expectancy beyond anything our ancestors could have imagined.Despite...

Immoral bioethical policies and practices advance toward implementation through discourse–first in professional journals, and then in elite popular media columns.That process is now gearing up regarding what I call “VSED-by-Proxy.”VSED stands for “voluntary stopping eating and drinking”–suicide by self-starvation–pushed for the elderly and others by those compaaaaa–ssssss–ionate death zealots at the Hemlock Society Compassion and Choices.But what about mentally incompetent residents of nursing homes who willingly eat, but who years previously stated in an advance medical directive that they wanted to be made dead by starvation under such circumstances?We see increasing advocacy in bioethics that nursing homes be required to...

After a terminally ill woman made headlines when she moved to Oregon so she could end her life under a doctor’s care, two State Senators are hoping to bring a similar law to New York. “There are only five states in the country that allow for people to make end of life decisions similar to what Oregon does, and New York is not one of them,” State Senator Diane Savino told the Observer. Brittany Maynard, 29, was suffering from brain cancer when she ended her life November 1 with a lethal dose of secobarbital prescribed by her physician. In New...

In the 1990s the Canadian Supreme Court ruled that assisted suicide is not a constitutional right. But the Court has again taken up the issue–and hence, I suspect the handwriting is on the wall.  That seems so clear that culture of death advocates are already making serious proposals to determine the look of the beast that seems to be a-aborning. University of Victoria bioethicist Eike-Henner W. Kluge has made news with a “Legislative Proposal” that would:1. Establish euthanasia death courts–also being proposed in the UK–in a country that doesn’t permit capital punishment;2. Allow a broad license to be euthanized based on almost wholly subjective criteria;3....

In the 1980’s, 12-year-old Martin Pistorious became seriously ill with what doctor’s believed was Cryptococci Meningitis. His health started deteriorating and Martin lost his ability to move, make eye contact and even speak to others. His doctors told his parents, Rodney and Joan Pistorious, to bring him home and let him die. They told them he was as good as a vegetable.However, he didn’t die. Joan said, “Martin just kept going, just kept going.” According to NPR news, his father would get up at 5 o’clock in the morning, get him dressed, load him in the car, take him to...

Just as an illustration of where too many among the intelligentsia and technocratic classes are concerning euthanasia: I would like to briefly review a book review by former New England Journal of Medicine executive editor–and assisted suicide booster–Marcia Angell.Angell reviews Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, by Atul Gawande. I have read the book and written a review, not yet published, so I can’t expound on that here. But I would like to focus on Angell’s increasing zeal for legalizing assisted suicide–and now, in this review, euthanasia.Angell spends about a quarter of her long review discussing just...

The case of Frank Van Den Bleeken—the Belgian murderer and rapist who requested to be euthanized rather than spend life in prison—has provoked its fair share of comment. And rightly so, for the facts of this case are shocking. But far more shocking is the rapidly growing euthanasia culture that made this whole affair possible. The increasing normalization of euthanasia is just one of many social trends that reveals a Europe that is becoming profoundly estranged from its Judeo-Christian heritage. As that happens, European societies are losing the moral and spiritual anchor with which to resist the gradual slide into...

In 2013, 650 babies died under Holland’s assisted suicide law because their parents or doctors deemed their suffering too difficult to bear. Although the law was designed to help terminally ill patients have a dignified death, the right to die has also been granted to a growing number of people who are physically healthy but have psychological problems. Official figures show that 13 patients suffering from mental illness were euthanized in 2011; by 2013 this number had risen to 42 patients.And it is not just adults who are being euthanized. According to the Royal Dutch Medical Association, as many as...

The Hippocratic Oath is one of the last remaining impediments to the complete deprofessionalization of medicine.Doctors don’t take it much anymore, but the people still embrace its core purpose as an essential protection of their lives and wellbeing.Now, in the LA Times, a doctor and journalist try to put the Oath out of its misery by taking the primary responsibility for interacting with dying patients away from physicians and handing decision-making over to “death doulas.” From, “The Hippocratic Oath and the Terminally Ill,” by Nora Zamichow and Ken Murray: If we allow medicine to prolong life, should we also allow...

"Jahi McMath is ALIVE." The very first column I filed in 2014 exposed the plight of a beautiful young girl, the same age as my daughter, whom medical experts declared "brain dead" after a routine tonsillectomy gone wrong. Are you ready for the rest of the story? Doctors told Jahi's mom, Nailah Winkfield, that her child's organs would "shut down" and her brain would "liquefy" if kept on life support. Hostile hospital administrators in Oakland moved to pull the plug on Jahi. Medical officials callously referred to Jahi as "dead, dead, dead" and dismissed the child as a "body." Smug...

When most people think of eugenics, they think of the unspeakable acts of Adolf Hitler and Dr. Josef Mengele. But history tells us that some of America’s best and brightest promoted eugenics as settled science and necessary for the preservation of society. Within 100 years, our deep thinkers went from declaring that in our new country “all men are created equal” to espousing the idea that “some animals men are more equal than others.”1 Eugenics was popularized in the in the United States in the 1890s. High school and college textbooks from the 1920s through the 1940s often had chapters...

I warned this would happen back in my first anti-assisted suicide article–Newsweek, June 28, 1993–in which I wrote: "Of greater concern to me is the moral trickledown effect that could result should society ever come to agree with Frances [to legalize assisted suicide]. "Life is action and reaction, the proverbial pebble thrown into the pond. We don’t get to the Brave New World in one giant leap. Rather, the descent to depravity is reached by small steps. First, suicide is promoted as a virtue. Vulnerable people like Frances become early casualties. Then follows mercy killing of the terminally ill. From...

Anybody paying attention to what has happened in our nation, and worldwide for that matter, regarding the lack of reverence for the dignity of life, is probably aware of the advances the culture of death has made over the past several decades. Here is some of what has happened:In 1968, a committee of 13 men at Harvard Medical School endorsed brain death as legal death; in 1981 it was approved by the American Medical Association. This has a profound effect on decisions regarding life and death and has placed physicians as the sole decision makers of who is alive and...

The late Richard John Neuhaus famously wrote of bioethicists: Thousands of medical ethicists and bioethicists, as they are called, professionally guide the unthinkable on its passage through the debatable on the way to becoming the justifiable until it is finally established as unexceptionable. In my over 20 years engaged in trying to push back against the bioethics movement, I have found that to be an absolutely accurate formula.Take, as one example, dehydrating the cognitively devastated to death–a slow and potentially agonizing death. That was once unthinkable, it became debatable in the 1980s, and is now unexceptional.Allowing infanticide has now reached the “debatable on the way...

New plans unveiled Friday could allow French doctors to put terminally ill patients into a deep sleep until they die. The French parliament will debate the issue in a new draft law, according to The Telegraph. So far only Belgium, the Netherlands and Switzerland explicitly permit euthanasia or assisted suicide. A 2005 French law already allows “passive euthanasia,” where a person causes death by withholding or withdrawing treatment that is necessary to maintain life, but the new proposal takes the idea further. The proposals by two MPs — one from the ruling Socialists, the other from the opposition UMP —...

A Scottish monk has been arrested for distributing a series of leaflets in the Cambridgeshire area critical of homosexuality, fornication, contraception, euthanasia, abortion, and divorce. Brother Damon Jonah Kelly, head of the Glasgow based charity the Black Hermits, was arrested by Cambridgeshire Police on December 8 on suspicion of a Section 5 (religious/racial) public order offence after he wrote a letter to the homosexual news publication, Pink News, claiming responsibility for the distribution of leaflets in the city of Ely, as well as in Cambridge, King’s Lynn and several other Cambridgeshire towns and cities. Initially police declined to take any...

Doctors in France will have the right to put terminally-ill patients into a deep sleep until they die, under plans unveiled on Friday that reignited a national debate on euthanasia. Apart from Belgium, the Netherlands and Switzerland, few countries in the world explicitly permit euthanasia or assisted suicide. In France, a 2005 law permits "passive euthanasia", where a person causes death by withholding or withdrawing treatment that is necessary to maintain life. The proposals by two MPs – one from the ruling Socialists, the other from the opposition UMP – go a step further, as they allow doctors to couple...

I accept properly diagnosed brain death as dead. Hence, when three doctors found that Jahi McMath was tragically gone, I accepted the diagnosis.But I also wrote that if her body did not deteriorate–as happens in almost all brain death cases–that would raise my eyebrows. Now, it’s one year later, and she remains here. My eyebrows are now above my receding hairline.Moreover, I am increasingly suspicious of the seeming ideological commitment of some to making sure she stays dead. The intensity of their resistance to even the possibility that a mistake has been made–or that we can learn something new about...

France’s president wants to allow doctors to keep terminally ill patients sedated until death comes, amid a national debate about whether to legalize euthanasia. François Hollande stopped short of recommending lethal injections and avoided the terms euthanasia and assisted suicide, highly sensitive issues in this majority-Catholic country. […] Doctors are divided about the idea. Hollande did not outline details of his proposal, but so-called terminal or palliative sedation can involve medicating patients until they die naturally of their illnesses, or until they starve. …

Udo Schuklenk, who was the chair of the one-sided Royal Society of Canada: End of Life Decision Making panel, is now proselytizing his philosophy (or Peter Singer's philosophy) promoting euthanasia for newborns and infanticide. Schuklenk uses quality-of-life arguments to support his eugenic philosophy to encourage the killing of newborns with disabilities.In an article published in The Journal of Thoracie and Cardiovascular Surgery, titled: Physicians can justifiably euthanize certain severely impaired neonates, Schuklenk argues that some lives are not worth living and that parents should have the right to decide to end the lives of newborns with disabilities. Schuklenk states: A quality-of-life ethic requires us to...