22Mar 2023 by Post

Euthanasia’s Cultural Collateral Damage: Less Respect for Human Life

bioethics, Canada, cerebral palsy, Christiane Belzile, crime, Culture, Culture & Ethics, Edmonton Journal, euthanasia, euthanasia consciousness, Francois Belzile, human life, insulin, Jack Kevorkian, judges, manslaughter, Medicine, murder, Robert Latimer, science
Canada has fallen off the euthanasia moral cliff by allowing broad categories of people to be killed by doctors as a means of ending “suffering.” Source
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25Jun 2022 by Post

How Euthanasia Activists Laid the Groundwork for Overturning Roe

abortion, activists, Anti-Euthanasia Task Force, assisted suicide, common law, Constitution, courts, Culture & Ethics, Dobbs v. Jackson, Due Process Clause, euthanasia, Fourteenth Amendment, history, hubris, Law, Medicine, Patients Rights Council, Roe v. Wade, Supreme Court, Washington v. Glucksberg
Back in the ’90s, the assisted-suicide movement tried to convince the Supreme Court to impose a Roe–style decision for their cause. Source
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26Mar 2022 by Post

Darwinism and Scientific Totalitarianism: John West’s Darwin Day in America

assisted suicide, beauty, COVID-19, Creativity, Culture & Ethics, Darwin Day in America, Darwinism, death, embryo, Enlightenment, ethics, euthanasia, Evolution, free speech, ingenuity, intelligence, John West, Medicine, New York Times, physicians, racehorse, speech, Terri Shiavo, theology, totalitarian science, unborn
The afterword, on “Totalitarian Science,” published in 2015, shows John West as a prophet of things to come. Source
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13Dec 2021 by Post

Bioethicists Okay Human Extinction to Eliminate Suffering

asteroid, Christianity, Culture & Ethics, eugenics, euthanasia, extinction, Hilary Greaves, human extinction, Humanize, Joni Eareckson Tada, Journal of Medical Ethics Blog, nihilists, Oxford University, Physics, Earth & Space, Roger Crisp, Social Darwinism, Suffering, transhumanism, University of Calgary, Walter Glannon, Will MacAskill
A few months ago, Oxford professor Roger Crisp opined that we might not want to stop a huge asteroid from hitting the Earth. Source
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07Apr 2020 by Post

Balancing Lives, Economics, and Public Policy in This Plague

borders, calculus, Congress, constitutional rights, coronavirus, COVID-19, Culture & Ethics, Economics, elderly, epidemiology, ethics, euthanasia, experts, governors, health, incubation period, Medicine, neurosurgeon, polis, Politics, President, Principle of Double Effect, probabilities, psychology, public policy, scientists, Senate, social distancing, sociology, Thomas Aquinas, triage, ventilators
I am a physician, and while I don’t treat coronavirus patients personally (I’m a neurosurgeon), I work in a regional coronavirus center and have first-hand knowledge of the medical impact of this pandemic. The danger the virus poses to life is substantial — in vulnerable people, it causes severe pulmonary compromise, often requiring the patient to be placed on a ventilator, and a substantial portion of these ventilated patients will die. The virus is highly contagious, and has a rather long incubation period, which helps it spread — people who have it continue to walk around and spread it for quite a while before they become sick and realize that they are contagious.  A Framework for the Wisest Decisions For a variety of reasons, the coronavirus plague is devastating to…
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25Jan 2020 by Post

Pressuring a Hospice to Kill

and organ-transplant centers, Angeline Ireland, assisted suicide, Big Government, British Columbia, Canada, caring, conscientious objection, Delta Hospice Society, dementia, doctors, ethics, euthanasia, freedom of conscience, hospice, hospice palliative care, killing, MAiD, medical assistance in dying, Medicine, memory-support facilities, minister of health, nursing homes, organ harvesting, patients, pediatric euthanasia, pediatric hospitals, podiatry, psychiatric institutions, Quebec, religious beliefs, socialism, socialized medicine, United States
Should hospice professionals be forced to assist the suicides of their patients who want to die? Not too long ago, the answer to that question would have been an emphatic “Of course not!” Hospice is not about making people dead. Rather, it seeks to help terminally ill patients live well through intensive medical, spiritual, psychological, and social treatments to alleviate the pain and emotional suffering that dying people and their families may experience. Don’t tell that to the provincial government of British Columbia. After the Supreme Court of Canada conjured a right for anyone diagnosed with a serious medical condition that causes “irremediable suffering” to receive lethal-injection euthanasia, British Columbia passed a law requiring all medical facilities that receive at least 50 percent of their funding from the government to…
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15Jan 2020 by Post

Save Animals, Not Sick People, from Death?

animal shelters, animals, California, cats, Culture & Ethics, doctor, Dogs, euthanasia, Gavin Newsom, governor, health care, Koret Shelter Medicine Program, lethal prescription, Medicine, patients, press conference, Sacramento Bee, UC Davis
Misplaced priorities are California’s specialty. Here’s an example: Governor Gavin Newsom wants to end euthanasia in animal shelters. From the Sacramento Bee story: Gov. Gavin Newsom wants California to stop euthanizing animals, and he’s ready to put taxpayer money toward the cause. “We want to be a no-kill state,” Newsom said during a press conference where he presented his 2020-21 budget. Specifically, Newsom’s budget calls for a $50 million one-time general fund allocation to the UC Davis Koret Shelter Medicine Program to develop a grant program for animal shelters, with a goal of helping local communities “achieve the state’s policy goal that no adoptable or treatable dog or cat should be euthanized,” according to the budget summary. Ironically, as the governor works to save animals from death, California has not…
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