Free Republic

A very sick 78-year-old doctor is dying in a Michigan prison, an anachronism left over from the 20th century. Should we let him die in prison, or do we have the decency to say, "Enough is enough. Release him and let him die at home"? The doctor is Jack Kevorkian, who was sentenced in 1999 to 10 to 25 years in Michigan's Lakeland Correctional Facility for Men. He traded his freedom for openly, shamelessly touting what he called our "right to die with dignity." He'd spent the 10 prior years brashly, illegally helping 130 terminally ill people end excruciatingly painful...

During the next 35 years, the traditional view of the sanctity of human life will collapse under pressure from scientific, technological, and demographic developments. By 2040, it may be that only a rump of hard-core, know-nothing religious fundamentalists will defend the view that every human life, from conception to death, is sacrosanct. In retrospect, 2005 may be seen as the year in which that position became untenable. American conservatives have for several years been in the awkward position of defending a federal funding ban on creating new embryos for research that prevents U.S. scientists from leading an area of biomedical...