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Attitudes toward fossil fuels are sharply and ideologically divided in the US. When asked in 2025 if we should prioritize developing renewable or fossil fuel 6 in 10 respondents favored renewables, but this is down from 8 in 10 in 2020 (according to Pew research). This decline is mostly driven by a flip in the attitude of Republicans, which went from 2/3 […]

The post The Health Effects of Air Pollution first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

BepiColombo is slowly uncovering more and more fun facts about Mercury as it continues its preliminary mission. One of the more interesting things found so far is a magnetic “chorus” that appears similar to a phenomenon found in Earth’s much larger magnetic field. A new paper in Nature Communications from the researchers responsible for the probe’s Mio instrument that is studying Mercury’s magnetic field describes what could be thought of as a form of magnetic birdsong.

Clumps of cells known as organoids are helping us to understand the brain, and the latest version comes equipped with realistic blood vessels to help the organoids live longer

Using a superconducting quantum computer, physicists created a large and complex version of an odd quantum material that has a repeating structure in time

AI may learn better when it’s allowed to talk to itself. Researchers showed that internal “mumbling,” combined with short-term memory, helps AI adapt to new tasks, switch goals, and handle complex challenges more easily. This approach boosts learning efficiency while using far less training data. It could pave the way for more flexible, human-like AI systems.

A repeating fast radio burst has just given up one of its biggest secrets. Long-term observations revealed a rare signal flare caused by plasma likely ejected from a nearby companion star. This shows the burst source isn’t alone, but part of a binary system. The finding strengthens the case that magnetars interacting with stellar companions can generate repeating cosmic flashes.

For the first time, astronomers have captured radio signals from a rare exploding star, exposing what happened in the years leading up to its death. The radio waves reveal that the star violently shed huge amounts of material shortly before it exploded, likely due to interaction with a nearby companion star. This discovery gives scientists a new tool to rewind the clock on stellar deaths. It also shows that some supernovae are far more dramatic in their final moments than previously thought.

How can microorganism communities known as biofilms, and have been hypothesized to be responsible for early life on Earth, be used for space exploration? This is what a recent study published in npj Biofilms and Microbiomes hopes to address as an international collaboration of researchers investigated the pros and cons of using biofilms in spaceflight. This study has the potential for scientists to better understand the role of biofilms in spaceflight while mitigating health risks of astronauts.

An international team of astronomers has uncovered the first definitive evidence that at least some fast radio bursts (FRBs) originate in binary stellar systems.

Supermassive black holes grow larger by accreting matter. When they're actively accreting matter they're called active galactic nuclei (AGN). AGN are the most luminous sources of persistent radiation in the Universe, yet they turn on and off as the SMBH passes through quiet and active phases. Astronomers have found one that is just turning on its powerful jets after a long period of dormancy.

Using the South Pole Telescope, astronomers have detected powerful stellar flares erupting from stars near the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way. Operating at millimetre wavelengths that can penetrate the dust obscuring our view of the core of the Galaxy, the telescope caught these dramatic magnetic energy releases in one of the most extreme environments in our Galaxy. The discovery opens a new observational window for studying stellar behaviour in regions previously hidden from view and provides insights into how stars survive and behave in the intense gravitational and radiation environment surrounding the Milky Way's central black hole.

The comet bearing Edmond Halley's name may have been misnamed! New research from Leiden University reveals that an 11th Century English monk recognised the famous comet's periodicity centuries before the British astronomer. Eilmer of Malmesbury witnessed the comet's appearances in both 989 and 1066, linking the two observations and understanding they represented the same celestial visitor returning after decades, a realisation documented by the medieval chronicler William of Malmesbury but overlooked by scholars until now. The discovery challenges whether history's most famous comet should continue bearing Halley's name when a Benedictine monk beat him to the discovery by more than 600 years.

Dark matter remains invisible to our telescopes, yet its gravitational fingerprints pervade the universe. Using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, scientists have produced one of the most detailed dark maps ever created, revealing with unprecedented clarity how dark matter and ordinary matter have grown up together. The map shows that wherever galaxies cluster in their thousands, equally massive concentrations of dark matter occupy the same space, a close alignment that confirms dark matter's gravity has been shepherding regular matter into stars, galaxies, and ultimately the complex planets capable of supporting life.

AI faces strong skepticism due to its potential for misuse, its drain on resources, and even its potential dumbing down of students. But new results illustrate its uses. A team of astronomers have used a new AI-assisted method to search for rare astronomical objects in the Hubble Legacy Archive. The team sifted through nearly 100 million image cutouts in just two and a half days, uncovering nearly 1400 anomalous objects, more than 800 of which had never been documented before.

Why are SMBH in the early Universe so massive? According to astrophysical models, these extraordinarily large SMBH haven't had time to become so massive. Super-Eddington accretion might explain it, but can it explain a very unusual early SMBH recently discovered?

The amount of rainfall in the southern Amazon basin has declined by 8 to 11 per cent since 1980, largely due to the impact of deforestation

The measles vaccine has prevented 60 million deaths since 2000. So why are so many children around the world missing out on it?

It's been about one millennia since humans directly observed a core-collapse supernova in the Milky Way. That's strange, since there should be 1 or 2 every century. By working with neutrino detectors, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory should be able to detect far more supernovae.

• Do you believe global warming is real?
• Do you believe in the germ theory of disease?
• Do you believe masks work and should be mandated?
• Do you believe Jesus was resurrected?
• Do you believe the Holocaust happened?
• Do you believe there are objective morals and values in life?

As a public intellectual who engages in debates and conversations on a wide range of subjects, I am often asked questions such as these, which I found puzzling at first until I figured out that my interlocutors were confusing the meaning of beliefs and facts. 

For example, I don’t “believe in” the germ theory of disease. I accept it as factually true, and as we’ve seen in the recent pandemic, a germ like the SARS-CoV-2 virus is not something to believe in or disbelieve in. It simply is a matter of fact and it can cause a deadly disease like Covid-19. 

Whether or not vaccines and masks slow its spread is also a factual question that science, at least in principle, can answer, although whether or not vaccines and masks should be mandated by law is a political matter that differs from scientific questions. But asking you if you “believe in” the SARS-CoV-2 virus would be like asking you if you “believe” in gravity. Gravity is just a brute fact of nature. It’s not something to believe or disbelieve. 

As the science fiction author Philip K. Dick famously quipped, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

Objective Truths and Justified True Belief

What we’re after here is knowledge, which philosophers traditionally define as justified true belief. That is, we want to know what is actually true, not just what we want to believe is true. The problem is that none of us are omniscient. If there is an omniscient God, it’s not me, and it’s also not you. Or, in the secular equivalent, there is objective reality but I don’t know what it is, and neither do you.

Truth: What It Is, How To Find It, & Why It Still Matters

Michael Shermer

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Once we agree that there is objective truth out there to be discovered and that none of us knows for certain what it is, we need to work together through open dialogue in communities of truth-seekers to figure it out, starting by acknowledging our shortcomings as finite fallible beings subject to all the cognitive biases that come bundled with our reasoning capacities. The workaround for this problem is having adequate evidence to justify one’s beliefs. Here are two examples from science:

• Dinosaurs went extinct around 65 million years ago. This is true by verification and replication of radiometric dating techniques for volcanic eruptions above and below dinosaur fossils. Since each layer can be accurately dated, we infer that the age of a fossil falls between these two dates. Above the strata dated 65 million years ago, there are no more dinosaurs. Ergo, we can assert with a high degree of confidence that this is an objective fact, and we can be satisfied in the truth of the proposition that dinosaurs went extinct around 65 million years ago, unless and until new data emerge. 
• Our universe came into existence at the Big Bang some 13.8 billion years ago. This is true based on the convergence of evidence of a wide range of phenomena such as the cosmic microwave background, the abundance of light elements like hydrogen and helium, the distribution of galaxies and the large-scale structure of the cosmos, the redshift of most galaxies that indicates they are all moving away from one another in a way that resembles a giant explosion, and the expansion of space-time itself that resulted from such a big bang, resulting in the accelerating expanding cosmos we see today.

Michael Shermer reminds us that the search for truth is not a luxury, but a necessity. This book is a powerful argument for why reality matters and a practical toolkit for how to find it.
―Sabine Hossenfelder, author of Existential Physics: A Scientist's Guide to Life's Biggest Questions

The above propositions are “true” in the sense that the evidence is so substantial that it would be unreasonable to withhold our provisional assent. At the same time, it’s not impossible, for example, that the dinosaurs went extinct recently, just after the creation of the universe some 10,000 years ago (as Young Earth Creationists assert). However, this proposition is so unlikely, so completely lacking in evidence, and so evidently grounded in religious faith, that we need not waste our time considering it any further (the debate about the age of the Earth was resolved over a century ago). 

Thus, a scientific truth is a claim for which the evidence is so substantial it is rational to offer one’s provisional assent.Provisional is the key word here. Scientific truths are temporary and could change with changing evidence. 

The ECREE Principle, or Why Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence

In his 1980 television series Cosmos, in the episode on the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligence existing somewhere in the galaxy, or of aliens having visited Earth, Carl Sagan popularized a principle about proportioning one’s beliefs to the evidence, when he pronounced that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” The ECREE principle was first articulated in the 18th century by the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume, who wrote in his 1748 An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding: “a wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.” 

ECREE means that an ordinary claim requires only ordinary evidence, but an extraordinary claim requires extraordinary evidence. Here’s a quotidian example. I once took a road trip from my home in Southern California to the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, home of all things New Age. To get there I took the 210 freeway north to the 118 Freeway north to the 101 freeway north to San Luis Obispo, where I exited to Highway 1 and followed the Pacific Coast Highway north through Cambria and San Simeon until arriving at the storied home of the 1960’s Human Potential Movement. Weirdly, just past Cambria, a bright light hovered over my car. Thinking it was a police helicopter, I pulled over to the side of the road, fearful that I had been busted for speeding (which I am wont to do). But it wasn’t the cops. It was the aliens, and they abducted me into their mothership and whisked me off to the Pleiades star cluster where their home planet is located. There I met extraterrestrial beings who gave me a message to take back to Earth—we must stop global warming and nuclear proliferation…or else.

Michael Shermer has a fine record as a long-time crusader for evidenced rationality. This fascinating and wide-ranging book should further enhance his impact on current controversies.
―Lord Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal, former President of the Royal Society

Now, which part of this story triggers your insistence on additional evidence? That’s obvious. My claim to have driven on California highways is ordinary and calls for only ordinary evidence (in this case, you can just take my word for it), but my claim to have been abducted by aliens and rocketed off to the Pleiadeian home planet is extraordinary, and unless I can provide extraordinary evidence—like an instrument from the dashboard of the alien spaceship, or one of the aliens themselves—you should be skeptical.

ECREE also suggests that belief is not an either-or on-off switch—not a discrete state of belief or disbelief, but a continuum on which you can place confidence in a belief according to the evidence: more evidence, more confidence; less evidence, less confidence. Consider the extraordinary claim that another bipedal primate called Big Foot, or Yeti, or Sasquatch survives somewhere on Earth. That would be quite extraordinary because after centuries of searching for such a creature none have been found. 

Truth (Autographed)

Michael Shermer

BUY FROM SHOP SKEPTIC

Before we assent to such a claim we need extraordinary evidence, in this case a type specimen—what biologists call a holotype—in the form of an actual body. Blurry photographs, grainy videos, and stories about spooky things that happen at night when people are out camping does not constitute extraordinary evidence—it’s barely even ordinary evidence—so it is reasonable for us to withhold our provisional assent. 

Impediments to Truth and How to Overcome Them

In addition to falling far short of omniscience, humans are also saddled with numerous cognitive biases, including (to name but a few): confirmation bias, hindsight bias, myside bias, attribution bias, sunk-cost bias, status-quo bias, anchoring bias, authority bias, believability bias, consistency bias, expectation bias, and the blind-spot bias, in which people can be trained to identify all these biases in other people but can’t seem to see the log in their own eye.

Truth lances the myth of truth's subjectivity, arguing (provocatively) that truth can generate moral absolutes. This stimulating, excellent book inspires you to spread the word that the Earth is not flat and that truth matters.
―Robert Sapolsky, author of Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will

Then there are the suite of logical fallacies, such as Emotive Words, False Analogies, Ad hominem, Hasty Generalization, Either-Or, Circular Reasoning, Reductio ad Absurdum and the Slippery Slope, after-the-fact reasoning, and especially why anecdotes are not data, why rumors do not equal reality, and why the unexplained is not necessarily the inexplicable.

With such listicles of cognitive biases and logical fallacies identified by philosophers and psychologists it’s a wonder we can think at all. But we can and do, through experience, education, and instruction in the art and science of thinking. What follows are some of the methods developed by philosophers and psychologists to identify and work-around all these impediments to the search for truth.

Practice Active Open-Mindedness. Research shows that when people are given the task of selecting the right answer to a problem by being told whether particular guesses are right or wrong, they do the following:

• Immediately form a hypothesis and look only for examples to confirm it.
• Do not seek evidence to disprove the hypothesis.
• Are very slow to change the hypothesis even when it is obviously wrong.
• If the information is too complex, adopt overly-simple hypotheses or strategies for solutions.
• If there is no solution, if the problem is a trick and “right” and “wrong” is given at random, form hypotheses about coincidental relationships they observed. 

In their book Superforecasting, Philip Tetlock and Dan Garner document how bad most people are at making predictions, and what skillsets those who are good at it employ. They begin with the results of extensive testing of people’s predictions. It’s not good. Even most so-called experts were no better than dart-tossing monkeys when their predictions were checked. When asked to make specific predictions—for example, “Will another country exit from the EU in the next two years?” and, presciently, “Will Russia annex additional Ukraine territory in the next three months?”—and their prognosticating feet were held to the empirical fire, Tetlock and Garner found that most experts were overconfident (after all, they’re experts), encouraged by the lack of feedback on their accuracy (if no one reminds you of your misses you’ll only remember the hits—the confirmation bias), and are victims of all the cognitive biases and illusions that plague the rest of us. 

Michael Shermer has spent his career grappling with the slipperiest word in our language: truth. As someone who knows firsthand what happens when truth gets lost in noise and narrative, I'm grateful for Shermer's clear-eyed insistence that truth is not only real, but necessary.
―Amanda Knox, author of Free: My Search for Meaning

The worst forecasters were people with big ideas—grand theories about how the world works—such as left-wing pundits predicting class warfare that never came, or right-wing commentators prophesizing a socialistic demise of the free enterprise system that never happened. Failed predictions are hand-waved away—“This means nothing!” “Just you wait!” Superforecasters, by contrast, practice active open-mindedness, which Tetlock and Garner defined quantitatively by asking experts “Do you agree or disagree with the following statements?” Superforecasters were more likely to agree that:

• People should take into consideration evidence that goes against their beliefs.
• It is more useful to pay attention to those who disagree with you than to pay attention to those who agree.
• Even major events like World War II or 9/11 could have turned out very differently.
• Randomness is often a factor in our personal lives.

Superforecasters were more likely to disagree that:

• Changing your mind is a sign of weakness.
• Intuition is the best guide in making decisions.
• It is important to persevere in your beliefs even when evidence is brought to bear against them.
• Everything happens for a reason.
• There are no accidents or coincidences. 

The psychologist Gordon Pennycook and his colleagues developed their own instrument of measuring active open-mindedness, in which people are asked whether they agree or disagree with the following statements, where the more open-minded answer is indicated in parentheses:

• Beliefs should always be revised in response to new information or evidence. (agree)
• People should always take into consideration evidence that goes against their beliefs. (agree)
• I believe that loyalty to one’s ideals and principles is more important than “open-mindedness.” (disagree)
• No one can talk me out of something I know is right. (disagree)
• Certain beliefs are just too important to abandon no matter how good a case can be made against them. (disagree)

Active open-mindedness is a cogent tool of reason in assessing the truth value of any claim or idea. As is reason itself, of which active open-mindedness is a subset of rational skills that must be cultivated through education and practice.

Michael Shermer pulls no punches: in a world where opinion too often masquerades as fact, he dismantles delusion and arms us with the tools to meet reality head-on.
―Brian Greene, author of Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving UniverseProtect and Defend the Constitution of Knowledge

Objective facts in support of provisional truths about the world are determined by tried-and-true methods developed over the centuries since the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment in what are sometimes called rationality communities—scholars, scientists, and researchers who collect data, form and test hypotheses, present their findings to colleagues at conferences, publish their papers in peer reviewed journals and books, and reinforce the norms of truth-telling to their colleagues and students along with themselves. In his book The Constitution of Knowledge, the journalist and civil rights activist Jonathan Rauch outlines and defends the epistemic operating system of Enlightenment liberalism’s social rules for attaining reliable knowledge when people cannot agree on what is true. Although these communities differ in the details of what, exactly, should be done to determine justified true belief, Rauch suggests several features held in common that constitute the constitution of knowledge:

• Fallibilism. The understanding that we might be wrong.
• Objectivity. A commitment to the proposition that there is a reality and we can know it through reason and empiricism.
• Disconfirmation. Challenging or testing any and all claims through peer review and replication (science), editing and fact-checking (journalism), adversarial lawyers (the law), and red-team review (business).
• Accountability. We should all be held accountable for our mistakes.
• Pluralism. An insistence on viewpoint diversity.

The most important norm of all is the freedom to critique or challenge any and all ideas. Why?

• We might be completely right but still learn something new in hearing what someone else has to say.
• We might be partially right and partially wrong, and by listening to other viewpoints we might stand corrected and refine and improve our beliefs. 
• We might be completely wrong, so hearing criticism or counterpoint gives us the opportunity to change our minds and improve our thinking. 
• By listening to the opinions of others we have the opportunity to develop stronger arguments and build better facts for our positions. 
• My freedom to speak and dissent is inextricably tied to your freedom to speak and dissent. If I censor you, why shouldn’t you censor me? If you silence me, why shouldn’t I silence you? 

If you disagree with me, it is the norms and customs of free speech and open dialogue that allows you to do so. From those open dialogues, debates, and disputations, in time the truth emerges.

Excerpt from Truth: What It Is, How to Find It, and Why It Still Matters, Johns Hopkins University Press. January 27, 2026

Assisted suicide, also known as “medical assistance in dying”, or MAID, has been legal in Canada since 2016 when the country’s Supreme Court ruled that “eligible adults with grievous and irremediable medical conditions” were entitled to medical assistance to end their lives.

In 2021 the permitted conditions for MAiD were expanded to this standard:

9.1.5 the person has a grievous and irremediable medical condition. These criteria are met only where the provider and assessor are of the opinion that:

(a) the person has a serious and incurable illness, disease, or disability;
(b) the person is in an advanced state of irreversible decline in capability; and
(c) the illness, disease, or disability or that state of decline causes the person enduring physical or psychological suffering that is intolerable to the person and cannot be relieved under conditions that the person considers acceptable.

(You can read the current MAID standards here.)

In the past MAID was largely restricted to people with a terminal illness, but now it includes patients with a medical condition that may not be terminal but causes physical or psychological sufffering that is intolerable. This thus includes people who want to end their lives because they’re suffering psychologically and/or physically with a medical condition and have found no relief. (“Depression”, however, does not qualify you in Canada for MAID; you must be suffering from a medical condition in a way that is intolerable. Nor can “depression” be listed on the death certificate—only the antecedent medical conditions that cause suffering.)  Similar standards apply in the Netherlands; however, in that country intolerable and irremediable mental distress itself qualifies you for euthanasia. (Subramanya wrote about this in a previous Free Press article, “I’m 28. And I’m scheduled to die in May.“)  The Guardian gives the Dutch standards:

Under Dutch law, to be eligible for an assisted death, a person must be experiencing “unbearable suffering with no prospect of improvement”. They must be fully informed and competent to take such a decision.

How is euthanasia performed in Canada ? The National Standards say this (these are limited to adults over 18 of sound mind, though if you have dementia you can order MAID in advance so long as you do it when you are in a period of compos mentis):

There are 2 methods of medical assistance in dying available in Canada.

Method 1: a physician or nurse practitioner directly administers a substance that causes death, such as an injection of a drug. This is sometimes called clinician-administered medical assistance in dying.

Method 2: a physician or nurse practitioner provides or prescribes a drug that the eligible person takes themselves, in order to bring about their own death. This is sometimes called self-administered medical assistance in dying.

Subramanya’s new article in The Free Press discusses the case of Kiano Vafeian, a 26-year-old Canadian who was blind and struggling with Type 1 diabetes with attendant severe neuropathy.  This had made hin depressed and he asked for MAID. He eventually got it and died from one of the two methods above. His death certificate said that his MAID was prompted by blindness and severe peripheral neuropathy; depression was not listed.  You can read the story, if you subscribe, by clicking on the screenshot below, or reading the free archived article here.

People are alarmed by assisted suicide, and the opponents are often religious.  Regardless, the proportion of all deaths that occur by MAID in Canada is in the range of 5-7%, and are rising. Here’s a graph of the increase from the article:

And the fate of requests for MAID. Note that most are approved.

You will be familiar with the reasons for objections to euthanasia. For very religious people, it is often that people should die when God wants them to go, regardless of their suffering (I call this the “Mother Teresa objection”). More rational people see MAID as a slippery slope, especially for someone like Kiano who wasn’t terminal. The new conditions, they say, will lead people who could otherwise lead tolerable lives to be euthanized in a moment of despair. (I’ll put some of the quotes below.) But of course, doctors have to testify that the euthanized patient did meet the criteria, so presumably they would investigate whether any depression could be cured (this is what they do in the Netherlands).  It’s not clear that Kiano was treated for his depression, though it’s implied, but to my mind I can understand how blindness and diabetes in a young man, with the diabetes slowly destroying his body, is sufficient to ethically permit euthanasia.

Kiano’s mother objected to his euthanasia because he seemed to have moments of enjoyment before he was put to sleep: he went to Mexico on vacation, joined a health club, and got a nice condominium in Toronto with a full-time caregiver paid for by mom. But it wasn’t enough.  He requested and got MAID on December 30, 2024.

Here are some opinions of non-relatives opposed to Kiano’s MAID:

Sonu Gaind, a University of Toronto psychiatry professor, told me that the fastest-growing category in the country’s MAID statistics is not cancer, heart disease, or any specific illness. It is a catch-all labeled as “other.” MAID deaths in the “other” category nearly doubled to 4,255 in 2023 from a year earlier, adding up to 28 percent of all assisted-suicide deaths, Gaind’s research found.

When I told Gaind about Vafaeian and what he had been through, Gaind responded: “I’m not denying his suffering, but it doesn’t paint a picture of someone who is constantly suffering. That contradiction should trouble people.”

He said that Canada’s assisted-suicide system “has been set up so that if the person says their suffering is intolerable, assessors will say, ‘Who am I to question that?’ ”

and

David Lepofsky, a blind lawyer and disability-rights advocate in Toronto, said that focusing on suffering rather than pain invites broad, subjective interpretations—and that the MAID process lacks any independent safeguards before death is delivered. “Blindness doesn’t cause pain,” Lepofsky said. “Millions of us live good, independent lives.”

and

Ramona Coelho, a family physician and member of Ontario’s MAID Death Review Committee, said provincial oversight reports increasingly show in general that the person’s suffering appeared to be driven less by medical decline than by loneliness, social distress, and fear of the future. “Young people relapse, and they also recover,” Coelho told me. Allowing government-sanctioned assisted suicide “during periods of acute vulnerability risks mistaking transient suffering for permanent decline.”

However, a doctor who performs MAID says this:

These are not people who seek assisted suicide “because of mental illness alone,” Wiebe insisted when we talked. “They have other things. . . . That’s what all of my experience is.”

Remember that chronic depression is a medical condition that is sometimes incurable and causes the same intolerable suffering specified by Canadian law (read the Subramanya’s previous [archived] account of a Dutch woman who requested and got euthanasia on the basis of severe and untreatable depression).

Some physicians object to MAID because their brief is to save lives (“First, do no harm”), but that is misguided. Throughout the U.S., for example, physicians often end the lives of suffering terminal patients by giving them an overdose of morphine. This is MAID, though it’s not given for depression. In 12 American states, though, including Illinois, assisted dying is legal.

The objections to Kiano’s euthanasia seem to me misguided—based on someone’s subjective opinion of the sufferer’s feelings. Gaind questions whether Kiano’s suffering really is intolerable.  He doesn’t seem to understand that such people can have, or act out, moments of seeming normality. Lepofsky, also blind, avers that his own sightlessness is tolerable to him, so why isn’t it tolerable to Kaiano? (He seems to forget that Kiano is suffering from painful effects of type 1 diabetes.) And Coelho doesn’t realize that proper treatment of people seeking MAID for mental illness might not cure severe depression.  In the case of 28-year-old Zoraya ter Beek in the Netherlands, the woman had tried many types of treatment and drugs for mental illness, and none of it worked. She wanted to end the pain of living, which had gone on for years, and I can fully understand that. (She died with assistance in 2024.)

It seems to me that the Canadian law doesn’t go far enough: it should consider mental illness alone sufficient grounds for euthanasia IF it is intolerable and doctors have been unable to relieve it over a substantial period of time. If doctors recognize that, who are other people to say that the mental distress is tolerable?

I think it’s time to realize that we should let some people go even if they are not medically terminally ill, for to do otherwise is to allow suffering that can’t be cured.  I am not worried about a “slippery slope,” which can be avoided with proper medical supervision before euthanasia. I am more worried about people suffering their whole lives and not being allowed to have a peaceful death with dignity. The alternative is a self-inflicted end by hanging, jumping from a building, or lying down in front of a train. Is that what we want?

I will add a poll:

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