101 articles
The highbrow Dear Abby of the New York Times — a.k.a. The Ethicist (who is a philosophy professor at NYU) — published an inquiry from a reader whose “difficult aunt” is pondering assisted suicide.
Read →I still marvel at people who think — even after decades of experience with these laws — that legalizing assisted suicide or euthanasia will remain limited to the few for whom nothing else can be done medically to prevent suffering. Not only is it not true, but it is never intended by euthanasia enthusiasts to be so constrained.
Read →Some are celebrating Canada’s government “indefinitely suspending” legalizing euthanasia for mental illness as a great victory for life. Not me.
Read →Religious freedom is under assault throughout the West around what I call “do harm” medicine. With doctors now expected to abort babies, kill or mutilate sick patients, or administer harmful substances to gender dysphoric children, and otherwise toe a utilitarian, secular line in performing professional responsibilities, Hippocratic and pro-life medical professionals and institutions are imperiled.
Read →Doctors are facing societal punishment or professional discipline for refusing to provide legal but controversial interventions like abortion, euthanasia, and gender transition due to their religious or moral beliefs. A British Columbia doctor was fined $28,100 for refusing to administer puberty blockers to a 14-year-old transgender girl based on his objections.
Read →Euthanasia has become widespread in Canada, with over 100,000 people having been euthanized by doctors and nurse practitioners. Some hospices have lost funding for refusing to participate, and doctors with moral objections face pressure to comply or leave medicine, while media reports highlight euthanasia as a source of organs and recount numerous horror stories.
Read →The spread of assisted suicide and euthanasia legalization and highlights that most doctors refuse to participate in these practices. It also mentions that doctors who refuse participation face threats such as professional license revocation and coercion, with bioethics figures advocating for mandatory involvement despite moral opposition.
Read →Smith argues that suicide-prevention campaigns inconsistently exclude assisted suicide and euthanasia from their concerns. He contrasts that exclusion with prevention strategies promoted by the World Health Organization.
Read →Drawing on his family's experience caring for relatives with Alzheimer's disease, Smith argues that dementia should not diminish a person's claim to compassionate care. This excerpt introduces his criticism of changing end-of-life attitudes and links readers to the complete column at The Epoch Times.
Read →Smith responds to coverage of a planned New York assisted-suicide clinic by warning about financial conflicts of interest. He argues that provider revenue and healthcare cost pressures could undermine protection of vulnerable patients.
Read →Smith joins Simon O'Connor to defend clinicians' freedom to decline participation in assisted suicide and euthanasia. The discussion also challenges a consumer-service model of medicine that treats professionals as obliged to provide any requested intervention.
Read →Smith criticizes proposals that would require clinicians to facilitate a patient's decision to stop eating and drinking to hasten death. He highlights conscience concerns and the particular implications of such proposals for people with dementia.
Read →The subtitle of the revised and updated version of my book criticizing utilitarian bioethics, Culture of Death, is, “The Age of ‘Do Harm’ Medicine.” Helping patients kill themselves by self-starvation and dehydration — known in euthanasia parlance as VSED (for voluntary stopping eating and drinking) — certainly fits that designation. Two major medical associations now have endorsed doctors assisting in such suicides by palliating the painful symptoms to help patients go all the way to death. The first was the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine (AAHPM) in 2023. This is especial
Read →An awful story has broken into the headlines illustrating the moral peril of commercial surrogacy. From the Texas Tribune story: [McKenna] West, a nurse, entered a surrogacy agreement in Alaska, where she lives, with the intended parents, Nausheen Gilkar and Omar Ahmed, through Worldwide Surrogacy Specialists, LLC, a Connecticut-based surrogacy agency. Typically under gestational agreements like the one that West signed with Gilkar and Ahmed, the intended parents, not the surrogate, have the parental rights to make choices relating to the fetus. The fetus West is carrying was diagnosed with hy
Read →In recent years, editors of medical, science, and bioethics journals have proclaimed almost every major societal problem to be a “health emergency” or crisis. Off the top of my head, I can think of several: guns, racism, immigration enforcement, global warming, abortion restrictions, and fear of future pandemics. Now, the editors of The Lancet want to stoke fear of summer wildfires as the pretext to claim yet another public health emergency. From, “Wildfires, a Health Emergency“: Europe is burning. Wildfires in France and Spain have engulfed hundreds of square miles of land, destroying homes a
Read →New York just legalized assisted suicide. Adding insult to injury, the law requires morally or religiously objecting doctors to be complicit in assisted suicides by cooperating with some of its provisions. Specifically, the Medical Aid in Dying Act requires that the “attending physician” of patients requesting assisted suicide perform specified functions before patients can be prescribed lethal substances, with no apparent opt-out in the law that I could discern for physicians who are morally or religiously opposed to such a request. These mandatory actions include examining the patient to det
Read →The West continues its love affair with the culture of death as the French National Assembly just voted to legalize euthanasia and assisted suicide, overriding the Senate’s rejection. I haven’t read the bill, but here are a few notes I discerned from various media reports: Please remember that the law as it currently exists will surely not be the permanent ceiling of permissibility, but as other jurisdictions illustrate, merely be the launching pad for an ever more expansive euthanasia regime. Moreover, even these weak-tea parameters will probably not be enforced meaningfully, because that’s h
Read →Assisted suicide legalization is bad medicine and even worse public policy. It abandons the sick, destroys human equality by creating a killable caste of people, and cheapens the intrinsic dignity of human life. Moreover, the supposed “strict safeguards” are neither strict — for example, relying on doctor self-reporting — nor particularly protective. Besides, as soon as the law goes into place, the safeguards are quickly redefined as “obstacles” to a good death and the process of loosening the law commences. These and other myriad problems have gotten the attention of Senators James Lankford (
Read →The legalization of assisted suicide/euthanasia corrupts medical ethics and not just because killing patients or assisting their suicides is a direct violation of the Hippocratic oath. No: Transforming sick and disabled people into a killable caste also objectifies them as potential natural resources to be mined or harvested. Hastened death and organ-harvesting have already been conjoined in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Spain, the Netherlands, and Belgium. (In the latter two countries, some cases have involved mentally ill patients.) The practice has been supported in prominent medical jour
Read →The Anglican Church of Canada has authorized clergy to bless people being euthanized just before, during, and after being lethally jabbed (when permitted by the bishop). From “Pastoral Liturgies at the Time of Death in Contexts of Medically Assisted Dying”: It is not our intent to enter into the ethical arguments regarding MAiD, nor to provide a moral argument for or against MAiD.…No matter where people are in their life journey, we as a Christian community and Christian leaders in particular are called to respond pastorally to the needs and concerns of the people before us. Wherever the churc
Read →The media is (properly) reporting that a Dutch doctor euthanized — i.e. killed — a sick twelve-year-old child (illness not reported). It is a “first” under a new Dutch law that allows euthanasia for children ages one to twelve. From the story in The Independent: In a latter to parliament, Dutch health minister Sophie Hermans said that the child had died last year but did not clarify their age, date of death or the illness that they suffered, according to broadcaster NOS. The law in the Netherlands was changed in 2014 to extend euthanasia to children under the age of 12 to allow them to “die wi
Read →In Quebec, a small town has granted “rights” to trees. From the CBC story: A small town west of Montreal has decided to officially recognize trees as living beings with rights of their own, in what an environmental organization describes as a first in Quebec and Canada. A resolution adopted by Terrasse-Vaudreuil city council on June 9 declares that trees are worthy of protection, “including the right to life, to natural growth, to integrity and to regeneration.” Does a “right to life” mean they can’t be cut down? Does the “right to natural growth” mean they can’t be trimmed or cleared for fire
Read →Gallup just issued its annual poll on “moral acceptability.” I was struck by the dramatically different results in the two questions about suicide. The first question asked about “doctor assisted suicide.” Close to a majority, 49 percent, of respondents answered that committing suicide with a doctor’s help is morally acceptable, while 45 percent responded that it is not. The other question asked simply about the moral acceptability of “suicide.” Strikingly, only 21 percent said that it is morally acceptable to take one’s own life, while a whopping 70 percent said it is not. Indeed, suicide was
Read →The utilitarian bioethicist Peter Singer opposes human exceptionalism. Indeed, he contends that being human is irrelevant to determining moral value. What counts are capacities and the ability to suffer. Singer advocates using the term “person” to identify individuals with the highest moral value. Since he believes that personhood is based on capacities, some humans are not persons — the unborn, infants, the profoundly cognitively disabled — while some animals are. This means that those animals matter more morally than the vulnerable humans he so casually depersonalizes. It is thus unsurprisin
Read →There is an old joke: What do you call the medical student who finished last in his class? Answer: “Doctor.” The increasing legalization of assisted suicide has accorded that joke a disturbing pertinence. A doctor who prescribes poison need not be an excellent medical practitioner. He or she need not specialize in treating patients who present with particular life-threatening conditions, and indeed, can prescribe even if never treating the patient’s underlying condition at all. For example, Jack Kevorkian was a pathologist who never treated a living patient after medical school. But if assiste
Read →In a newly released paper in the prestigious journal Bioethics, three prominent bioethicists argue that when someone decides to commit suicide via self-starvation and dehydration — known in euthanasia movement parlance as “voluntary stop eating and drinking” (VSED) — doctors should be allowed to “terminally sedate” the person trying to die when necessary to prevent intractable suffering. Patients who commit VSED are often not terminally ill. In fact, euthanasia organizations promote self-starvation to the elderly who are not dying and as a means of becoming eligible for assisted suicide where
Read →Serious moves are afoot to allow ending the lives of dementia patients, either by allowing them to be killed by lethal jab euthanasia if requested in a written advance directive (where legal), or to allow a document to be signed requiring caregivers to withhold sufficient food and water to sustain life. New Jersey seems to move subtly in the latter direction with a vaguely worded bill, S.B. 4186, that could open the door to intentional legal undernourishment. From the bill: It is the public policy of this State to respect the dignity, autonomy, and previously expressed wishes of individuals li
Read →Canada has gone hog wild for euthanasia. But the pro-death tide may — may — be beginning to turn. The province of Alberta just passed a bill that significantly restricts eligibility for euthanasia (medical aid in dying, or MAID), soon to be signed into binding law. The biggest change in Bill 18 ends the eligibility of non-terminally-ill patients to be MAIDed (known as Track 2). Among the provisions of Bill 18 (“Safeguards for Last Resort Termination of Life Act”), as summarized by the government: Eligibility in Alberta to individuals 18 and over with capacity to make their own health care deci
Read →Uterine transplants are becoming more common to enable infertile women — and perhaps, eventually men — to give birth. How’s that project going? A new study detailing the outcomes of more than 40 cases of uterine transplants and subsequent IVF-enabled pregnancies published in JAMA provides details: Between 2016 and March 2026, a total of 44 women underwent uterus transplant. One month after uterus transplant, 37 women had a viable transplanted uterus. As of April 2026, a total of 33 women underwent embryo transfer (90 embryos), resulting in 47 clinical pregnancies in 31 unique women, 39 of whic
Read →The other day, I wrote about Wendy Duffy, a healthy woman in deep grief because of the death of her son, who was planning to die at a Swiss death clinic. Alas, Duffy apparently did the deed. From the New York Post story: The physically healthy British mom, irreparably heartbroken over the death of her only son, died by euthanasia in Switzerland on Friday. Wendy Duffy, 56, died at the Pegasos assisted suicide clinic in Basel, in what the controversial organization called a “sane suicide,” the Daily Mail reported. “I can confirm that Wendy Duffy, at her own request, was assisted to die on April
Read →