Since leaving his legal career in 1985 to pursue writing and public advocacy, Wesley J. Smith has worn many hats in the bioethics arena. He is an award-winning author, senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, an attorney for the International Task Force on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide and special consultant for the Center of Bioethics and Culture.
When Smith is not busy doing government consulting on bioethical issues, appearing on TV and radio, lecturing at universities, writing a new book and traveling the world, he defends the importance of human life on his blog, Secondhand Smoke.
In May 2004, Smith was named by the National Journal one of the nation’s top expert thinkers in bioengineering. He spoke with CitizenLink about his work and his passion for human life.
1. How did you go from writing books with Ralph Nader to defending life?
I had a friend commit suicide under the influence of Hemlock Society literature. (The Hemlock Society, now called Compassion & Choices, is a nonprofit, pro-euthanasia/assisted suicide organization.) When I saw the scurrilous nature of this literature, I saw these people giving this very disturbed woman moral permission to kill herself and teaching her how to do it. I was so upset by this that I wrote a piece in Newsweek magazine that warned against this euthanasia movement and the people that would be victimized by it. I got so much hate mail that I thought, “What happened to my culture and where was I when that happened?” And that got convinced me I had to start advocating against assisted suicide and euthanasia.
2. Terri Schiavo died March 31, 2005, after 13 days of court-ordered dehydration and starvation. What long-term impact do you think Schiavo's death will have on the care of the medically vulnerable?
It really has put the issue squarely on the front burner of people’s consciousnesses. She was certainly not the first one to be dehydrated to death in this manner, and she will not be the last. But before Terri, most people would say, “I didn’t know.” No one can say that anymore. And now, we will be held morally accountable because we can no longer plead ignorance. We now have to decide: Do people with severe cognitive incapacities have the same moral value as the rest of us?
3. What can families do if they are being bullied into ending the life of a loved one?
There seems to be a struggle between the traditional, Hippocratic value system of intrinsic value and equal moral worth for all people; and this utilitarian view, which would allow doctors and ethics committees to refuse wanted life-sustaining treatment based on quality-of-life determinations. People have to make it very clear they do not want ethics committees making these judgments on their behalf. If they can’t make their own decisions, it should be their family or people they name in a durable power of attorney. People have to let it be known very clearly what they want or don’t want.
4. It seems what it means to be human is being redefined. Would you agree?
There are certainly people trying to redefine what grants a life ultimate value, and there are many who say that being biologically human is irrelevant. For example, utilitarian bioethicists contend that it isn’t being a human that matters morally; it’s being a “person,” a status that must be earned by possessing sufficient cognitive capacities such as being self aware or having the ability to value one’s own life. In this view, there is such a thing as a human non-person, and they have less perceived value than “persons.” So who are these unfortunate human non-persons? All unborn life, of course. But also newborn infants who, after all, cannot value their own lives.
The animal rights movement, which must be distinguished from animal welfare, also denies that being human has intrinsic value. Rather, what matters morally is the ability to feel pain. So, since a cow feels pain and a human feels pain, in this view, we and bovines are moral equals.
5. Given embryonic stem-cell research, human cloning and genetic engineering, is science working against the pro-life movement?
An unfortunate hubris has seeped into the leadership of science and bioethics — an attitude that sees science as the be-all and end-all. But naked science, unmediated by morality, can become monstrous. I’m not saying these scientists are monstrous, but that biotechnology has developed astonishing powers to the point that we possess the ability to manipulate the very building blocks of life. It seems to me that kind of sheer power calls for a little humility. After all, we are the species that created the unsinkable Titanic.
In our society, we create proper parameters and checks and balances through democratic processes. We don’t allow certain things to be done in human research, not because science says don’t do it, (but) because our ethics and our values say don’t do that to human beings.
Science, as every human enterprise, needs ethical boundaries beyond which it should not go, and we have a right to decide what those proper parameters are.
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