Our Discovery Institute colleague and Evolution News contributor Wesley J. Smith testified in Texas before the state’s Senate Committee on Health and Human Services. His subject was the futile care law in Texas, which Smith has characterized as “medical coercion”:

The theory behind this, as he has said here, is frightening: it “allows doctors to unilaterally refuse wanted life-sustaining treatment based on the physician’s values — even if the patient has requested that the care continue, even if it vetoes a patient’s advance medical directive.” He calls the law in the Texas the “worst such law in the U.S.”

As Wesley testified, “Here in Texas it’s a one-way street, because you’re allowed to say no but you’re not necessarily allowed to say yes.”

The crispness of the formulation impressed his questioner, who responded, “Well said. Well said. Thank you.” Indeed. Thank you to Wesley Smith for fighting what’s often a very lonely fight against the increasingly dehumanizing tendency in contemporary medicine which, you would think, should be the most human and humane profession out there.