Here is Wesley Smith’s response to the news that Jack Kevorkian will be lecturing at UCLA on January 15, 2011.http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/secondhandsmoke/2011/01/12/kevorkian-demonstrates-that-killing-can-be-a-path-to-fame-and-fortune/ Smith comments near the conclusion of his post: “Few things better illustrate the degradation and degeneration of our culture than the elevation of Kevorkian in the media and popular culture to respectability and adulation. ” Richard M.
Category: Euthanasia
The Obama Administration has shelved the end of life counseling regulations. Here are links to Wesley Smith’s commentary. http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/secondhandsmoke/2011/01/05/medicare-end-of-life-counseling-now-to-be-removed-from-regulations/ http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/secondhandsmoke/2011/01/05/end-of-life-care-counseling-whiplash-part-2/ Richard M.
Colleagues involved in linguistic study may find Google’s Ngram feature helpful as a starting point for discussion about the use of words over the centuries. A word of caution, though: entering the words “abortion,” “infanticide,” and “euthanasia” results in a graph which may be misleading. As pro-life scholars know, “abortion” was often called “infanticide” by British […]
The controversy about health care reform and abortion continues. See Richard Doerflinger’s analysis, “Abortion returns to the health care reform debate.” http://usccbmedia.blogspot.com/2010/07/abortion-returns-to-health-care-reform.html His analysis deals with the recent discovery that certain statewide insurance plans (funding by federal money) covered elective abortions. After an outcry, the Obama Administration eventually made clear that abortion would not be […]
I highly recommend Bob Destro’s article on the Terri Schiavo case. “Learning Neuroscience the Hard Way: The Terri Schiavo Case and the Ethics of Effective Representatation,” at 78 Miss. L. J. 833-903 (2009). There have been scores of articles on various aspects of the Schiavo controversy. (My own short paper on the Schiavo case is […]
I think there is a perception that the issue of assisted suicide has receded in importance. The issue does not seem to have the high profile it did in the mid-1990s when Jack Kevorkian was on the loose and when it appeared that the US Supreme Court might create a constitutional right to physician-assisted suicide. But […]