Posted on 12/15/2014 4:40:26 PM PST by Morgana
The late Richard John Neuhaus famously wrote of bioethicists:
Thousands of medical ethicists and bioethicists, as they are called, professionally guide the unthinkable on its passage through the debatable on the way to becoming the justifiable until it is finally established as unexceptionable.
In my over 20 years engaged in trying to push back against the bioethics movement, I have found that to be an absolutely accurate formula.
Take, as one example, dehydrating the cognitively devastated to deatha slow and potentially agonizing death. That was once unthinkable, it became debatable in the 1980s, and is now unexceptional.
Allowing infanticide has now reached the debatable on the way to justifiable stagewith some of the worlds most prominent bioethicists and medical/bioethical journals publishing apologies for infanticide. (Remember the after-birth abortion article in the Journal of Medical Ethics two years ago?)
Latest example: The Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery hosted a debate on infanticideSee!in which the prominent Canadian bioethicist Udo Schuklenk argues in favor of the propriety of infanticide.
Killing severely ill or dying babies is okay, dont you know, because human beings dont have intrinsic dignity. What matters is the quality of life ethic. From, Physicians Can Justifiably Euthanize Certain Severely Impaired Neonates:
A quality-of-life ethic requires us to focus on a neonates current and future quality of life as relevant decision making criteria. We would ask questions such as: Does this baby have the capacity for development to an extent that will allow him or her to have a life and not merely be alive? If we reach the conclusion that it would not, we would have reason to conclude that his life is not worth living.
That is an entirely subjective question, isnt it? Its in the eye of the utilitarian beholder.
Schuklenk might sayI dont knowthat only a baby that would never be conscious should be killed. But the authors of Journal of Medical Ethics article opined that Down babies could be killed because they can be aborted.
Netherlander doctors have killed babies with spina bifida and other physical disabilities. Once human value becomes subjective, the extent of the right to life is reduced to who has the power to decide.
Sometimes when this issue comes up, opponents yell, But thats what the Nazis did! NO. That is what the Nazis allowed doctors who wanted infanticide to do.
German infanticide was driven by doctors and what we would now call bioethicists. Indeed, the very first infanticide, Baby Knaur, would almost surely receive the Okay-to-Kill rubber stamp from Schuklenk. From my book Culture of Death, quoting three notable history books that focused on the case:
The first known German government-approved infanticide, the killing of Baby Knauer, occurred in early 1939. The baby was blind and had a leg and an arm missing.
Baby Knauers father was distraught at having a disabled child. So, he wrote to Chancellor Hitler requesting permission to have the infant put to sleep. Hitler had been receiving many such requests from German parents of disabled babies over several years and had been waiting for just the right opportunity to launch his euthanasia plans.
The Knauer case seemed the perfect test case. He sent one of his personal physicians, Karl Rudolph Brandt, to investigate. Brandts instructions were to verify the facts, and if the child was disabled as described in the fathers letter, he was to assure the infants doctors that they could kill the child without legal consequence. With the Fuhrers assurance, Baby Knauers doctors willingly murdered their patient at the request of his father. [Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, pp. 95-96; Lifton, Nazi Doctors, pp. 50-51; Gallagher, By Trust Betrayed, pp. 95-96.]
Brandt was hanged at Nuremberg. These crimes came from a rejection of intrinsic human dignity and accepting a subjective quality of life ethic.
Schuklenk also spills the beans that infanticide will be about money:
The question of whether it would be a wise allocation of scarce health care resources to undertake the proposed surgical procedures invariably arises in circumstances such as this. Continuing life-prolonging care for the infant would be futile, it would constitute a waste of scarce health care resources.
Health care resources ought to be deployed where they can actually benefit patients by improving their quality of life. This cannot be achieved in the scenario under consideration.
Several years ago at Princeton, I castigated the university for giving infanticide proponent Peter Singer one of the most prestigious endowed chairs in the world. He was brought to Princeton not in spite of believing in the moral propriety of killing babies (because they are supposedly not persons) but because of it.
In the Q and A part of the presentation, one professor objected, saying he liked academic freedom and the interplay of ideas. In reply, I asked if Princeton would ever bring the racist Noble Laureate William Shockley to the university, regardless of his expertise in physics. He said, honestly, No.
Exactly. Racism is beyond the paleand properly so. The fact that Shockleys expertise would have had nothing to do with racial politics wouldnt have mattered. He would have been unemployable at any major university.
Infanticide is the same bigotry aimed at different victims. It is now considered a respectable and debatable proposition in bioethics.
If we dont keep pushing back very hard, it will, one day, become unexceptional.
Margaret Sanger smiles
Most bioethicists have agreed with Garrett Hardin and Peter Singer from the beginning. Hardin and Singer were simply more honest and forthright about their beliefs.
what the heck has happened to human beings?
Have we become so demented as to discuss human life in terms of subjective ethics?
Eventually this will come to the point where a 25 yo who has an illness that is expensive to treat will be reviewed on IQ and past achievements to determine if he will be treated or euthanized. It’s as inevitable as the erosion of the value of human life is.
The entire premise of the intelligencia driven concept of “ethics” is an effort to drive Christian thought out of the debate. They’re the epitome of dumb idols and god’s to themselves.
Ethics are for people who oppose morality.
Ethics are for people who oppose morality.
amen.
The way to stop euthanasia cold is to stop those that perform it. This means targeted killing of those who commit medical homicide by a neutral party with no connection to the families of the murderer’s victims.
Imagine if the US government licensed serial killers to murder random people without the risk of arrest or prosecution. Since the government was actively supporting these serial killers, it loses its legitimacy in enforcing the law. So it falls to the citizenry to stop the serial killers, by whatever means necessary, even if doing so is forbidden by the government.
In any event, once a threshold number of medical murderers were killed, the message would get around to the vast majority of other medical personnel willing to murder, that they should not, lest they in turn fall to the other edge of the sword.
First you relabel them to fetuses or chunks of biomass and then you devalue them as being of little consequence, and finally you arrogantly dismiss them through elegant ethics narratives.
Articles that explain how modern liberals suffer from a mental disorder.
If “they” abolish the “right to life”, how long do “they” think it will be before somebody is deciding against “them” rather directly?
Worth a bookmark. He states the issue very clearly.
if that be the case, then there is no such area of concern known as ethics.
Maybe I am an old dinosaur, but all life has value. Even a life measured in days, months or just a few years.
I watch the people’s faces coming out of Mass, the time when their lives are most affected by our Blessed Lord’s earthly mission. Sometimes my notice is caught by a heavenly glow on the faces of mothers with many children. Little children are innocently preoccupied by more immediate emotions. But most arresting are the looks of young people, often ranging between wistfulness and angst.
Youth are faced with some of the most serious business of life, finding their future course in the midst of conflicting feelings and discordant noise from the world. Young people seeking guidance often meet with de facto apathy from those who could help them. But some of those most actively seeking to influence young people have an actual malicious intent.
One of these who have chosen evil, is Princeton bioethicist Peter Singer. The extremism of his view, that young children can be “aborted” until they are several years of age, might be dismissed as ivory tower ravingsexcept that the views he spearheaded are now becoming common.
THERE EXISTS IN CONTEMPORARY CULTURE a certain Promethean attitude which leads people to think that they can control life and death by taking the decisions about them into their own hands. Pope John-Paul II, Evangelium Vitae §15“A trend seen by prolife activists that frequently engage college students on campuses nationwide is the growing acceptance of post-birth abortion, or killing the infant after he or she is born, campus prolife outreach leaders tell The College Fix.
“Anecdotal evidence by leaders of prolife groups such as Created Equal and Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust said in interviews that not only do they see more college students willing to say they support post-birth abortion, but some students even suggest children up to 4 or 5-years-old can also be killed, because they are not yet ‘self aware.’
“We encounter people who think it is morally acceptable to kill babies after birth on a regular basis at almost every campus we visit,” said Mark Harrington, director of Created Equal. “While this viewpoint is still seen as shocking by most people, it is becoming increasingly popular.”
More college students support post-birth abortion by Mairead McArdle, Thomas Aquinas College, October 29, 2014, thecollegefix.com/post/19896/
Involuntary “euthanasia” needle poised over condemned person’s arm in The Giver movie
In Lois Lowry’s Newberry Award winning, young people’s novel The Giver, progtagonist Jonas resolves his youthful lifecourse quest by squarely facing up his society’s so extreme opposition to the disorder of suffering that deliberate culling of problem people is routine and mandatory.
The depiction of Jonas’ rebellion for the cause of life is highly timely: It has been nearly 10 years since Terry Schiavo was unjustly put to death, but actually several decades since the inconvenient disabled became subject to involuntary killing.
And more than a century has transpired since Msgr. Robert Hugh Benson predicted the trends of these times, in his seminal, apocalyptic sci-fi The Lord of the World.
Robert Hugh Benson’s Lord of the World coming true before our eyes
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A FORMER EUTHANASIA SUPPORTER warned of a surge in deaths if the British Parliament allowed doctors to give deadly drugs to their patients. ‘Don’t do it Britain,’ said Theo Boer, a veteran European watchdog in assisted suicide cases. ‘Once the genie is out of the bottle, it is not likely ever to go back in again.’ dailymail.co.uk
Involuntary, physician-facilitated terminations have now gone mobile in the Netherlands. Coming soon to a family transition crisis near you.
Wow, wonder if there are any Howard Johnson’s in the Netherlands.
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