Communications Department
202.626.8825
mediarelations@nrlc.org
By Wesley J. Smith Doctors are incredibly knowledgeable. They understand when people are terminally ill or unlikely to survive a traumatic injury. But they are not infallible. People don’t die by the numbers. Some patients prove unexpectedly resilient. Sometimes true...
By Wesley J. Smith Another family in the UK is fighting to keep doctors from forcing their sick baby off of life support. From The Mirror story: Charlie Gard supporters are rallying round the family of a seriously ill little boy as his parents face a battle with...
By Wesley J. Smith I have long believed that Texas’s futile care law is unconstitutional. Specifically, the law permits a hospital bioethics committee to kick a patient out of wanted life-sustaining treatment that is working–e.g., keeping the patient alive–based on...
By Wesley J. Smith Thousands of medical ethicists and bioethicists, as they are called, professionally guide the unthinkable on its passage through the debatable on its way to becoming the justifiable until it is finally established as the unexceptionable. -- Richard...
By Wesley J. Smith Futile care” is ad hoc health care rationing. It permits a doctor to refuse wanted life-sustaining treatment that is working, based on the values of the MD that keeping the patient alive is not the “medically appropriate” approach. The term...
By Michael Cook A right-to-die case which has riveted Spain ended on October 9 with the death of a disabled 12-year-old girl. Andrea Lago Ordóñez had a rare degenerative condition which landed her in a hospital in Galicia, in the northwest of the country, for the last...
By Dave Andrusko When last we wrote about Hassan Rasouli, the Supreme Court of Canada had upheld a decision of the Ontario Court of Appeal, which concluded that Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre had to go through a legally established futile care administrative...
By Wesley Smith Editor’s note. Part of the reason for our year-long “Roe at 40” series is to provide historical background for what has come to bear ugly fruit. In this instance—a story that first appeared in the Weekly Standard in 2000 and reprinted in the December...
By Wesley J. Smith Futile Care Theory (aka medical futility) permits doctors and/or hospital bioethics committees to unilaterally withdraw wanted life-sustaining treatment based on cost and/or quality of life. This isn’t because the treatments don’t or won’t...
By Wesley J. Smith I was pretty teed off about the Canadian doctors trying to force Hassan Rasouli off of wanted life-sustaining treatment. Then, when I found out that even though they were absolutely wrong in their “certainty” that he would never wake up, they still...