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Posted on 02/08/2012 4:53:32 PM PST by wagglebee
February 8, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The conundrum faced by the organ transplant industry, that the removal of vital organs kills the “donor,” can be “easily obviated by abandoning the norm against killing,” two leading U.S. bioethicists have said. In an article titled, “What Makes Killing Wrong?” appearing in last month’s Journal of Medical Ethics, the authors have moved the argument forward by admitting that the practice of vital organ donation ignores “traditional” medical ethics.
“Traditional medical ethics embraces the norm that doctors … must not kill their patients. This norm is often seen as absolute and universal. In contrast, we have argued that killing by itself is not morally wrong, although it is still morally wrong to cause total disability.”
Traditional ethicists have responded, warning that this stream of thought, now common in the medical community, will ultimately undermine the right of anyone to life or the protection of law, and will annihilate public trust in the medical profession.
“If this dreadful doctrine is permitted and practised it is impossible to conjure up the degradation to which it will lead,” said Anthony Ozimic, communications manager of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC). A physician “has but to certify his patients as unproductive and he receives the command to kill.”
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong a Duke University bioethicist and Franklin G. Miller, an ethicist with the National Institutes of Health, the federal health authority in the US, admitted that patients who are routinely declared dead for purposes of organ “harvesting” are in fact alive and that removing their organs kills them.
Pro-life objectors to the practice of “non-heart beating organ donation” have long argued that it is tantamount to murdering helpless patients, reducing human persons to mere organ farms. The article proposes, however, that this is simply not a problem. Killing a patient who has lost all functional “abilities” and autonomy, “cannot disrespect her autonomy, because she has no autonomy left. It also cannot be unfair to kill her if it does her no harm.”
“Killing by itself is not morally wrong,” the authors said, “although it is still morally wrong to cause total disability.” The problem with killing is “not that the act causes loss of life or consciousness but rather that the act causes loss of all remaining abilities.”
Ozimic called the paper “obnoxious” and warned that its authors have “forgotten the lessons of the 20th century,” referring to the utilitarianism-based eugenics programmes of the pre-war Nazi government.
Ozimic quoted the famous 1941 sermon of Clemens von Galen, Cardinal Archbishop of – known as the “Lion of Munster” for his opposition to the Nazi euthanasia programme: “Once admit the right to kill unproductive persons… then none of us can be sure of his life.”
Ozimic said that if it is allowed to continue the concept will spell the end of our current understanding of medicine as doing good for human persons.
“We shall be at the mercy of any committee that can put a man on the list of unproductives. There will be no police protection, no court to avenge the murder and inflict punishment upon the murderer. Who can have confidence in any doctor?”
But the article’s authors admit that the situation is already grave from the point of view of traditional medical ethics. The so-called “dead donor rule,” they say, is already “routinely violated” in transplant practice anyway.
In order to be consistent with “traditional medical ethics” the practice of organ transplants, already a multi-billion dollar international medical industry, would have to be stopped immediately. But stopping organ transplants on the mere grounds that it kills people, they said, would be “extremely harmful and unreasonable from an ethical point of view.”
Ozimic critiqued the paper, saying, “According to some doctor, or because of the decision of some committee, they have no longer a right to live because they are ‘unproductive citizens’.
“The opinion is that since they can no longer make money, they are obsolete machines, comparable with some old cow that can no longer give milk or some horse that has gone lame. What is the lot of unproductive machines and cattle? They are destroyed.” But men and women, Ozimic said, are neither machines nor cattle who can be discarded when they no longer serve someone else’s needs.
“Here we are dealing with human beings, with our neighbours, brothers and sisters, the poor and invalids . . . unproductive - perhaps! But have they, therefore, lost the right to live? Have you or I the right to exist only because we are ‘productive’?”
Shocking as it may sound to the layman’s ears, however, the article’s position is not unusual in the bioethics community. The notion that the value of human life is founded upon the individual’s abilities has become run-of-the-mill in universities and, more crucially, in hospital ethics committees. It was popularised by Peter Singer, the professor of ethics at Princeton University, who infamously proposed that parents have the power to convey personhood upon their newborn children and should be allowed to kill them at will.
The fixation on autonomy, one of the three “principles” that utilitarian secular bioethics regards as the ultimate indicators of human value, has driven much of the international pressure for legalised euthanasia. Around the world, secular bioethicists supported the killing of Terri Schindler Schiavo on the grounds that her “autonomy” was permanently impaired.
Experts have noted that this form of bioethics, as distinct from classical, Hippocratic medical ethics, has since the 1970s become the leading stream of thought in most medical organisations in developed countries. The movement has succeeded in legalising euthanasia in the Netherlands and Belgium and assisted suicide in three US states.
In addition to outright euthanasia and legalised assisted suicide, other means of killing patients are sneaking in under the legal radar in response to the demands of autonomy-obsessed Bioethics. “Terminal sedation” and death by dehydration or withdrawal of life-saving drugs and treatments have become common causes of death among elderly and disabled patients in the UK, Canada and across Europe.
The culture of death hasn't forgotten what the Nazis did, they have embraced it.
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I have always hated doctors and hospitals with a passion.....now maybe I realize why.
Sick bastards.
Anything the subject “bioethics” comes up. Fight it if you can. It’s caca.
b4l8r
Never trust a man who calls himself an “ethicist”. He is claiming that title in order to advance something unethical.
Never trust a man who calls himself an “ethicist”. He is claiming that title in order to advance something unethical.
I wouldn’t worry about this too much.
When Obama care starts paying Doctors who are capable of doing Organ Transplants the same pay as Podiatrists who trim toenails , there arent going to be many transplants done. Also the transplants cost a lot of money and the death panels would only allow them for the very rich and Congressional politicians anyway.
“I wouldn’t worry about this too much.”
Well, a couple of Nazi quacks have stepped forward - publicly - and advocated killing folks for organs.
We aren’t that far removed from World War II and what we did to Nazi scum after the war.
Hang the SOBs.
But we need to wait until we can be certain those we kill belong to the wrong political party /s.
This, of course, begs the question of why, if human life isn't worth preserving, are organ transplants even considered?
Killing a patient who has lost all functional “abilities” and autonomy, “cannot disrespect her autonomy, because she has no autonomy left. It also cannot be unfair to kill her if it does her no harm.”
Most people consider the act of killing a very harmful act.
“Killing by itself is not morally wrong,” the authors said, “although it is still morally wrong to cause total disability.”
I can't wait to see this one trotted out by a murderer's defense lawyer. "Sure, he killed 12 people, but he should be acquitted because he didn't cause any of them to be disabled!"
In order to be consistent with “traditional medical ethics” the practice of organ transplants, already a multi-billion dollar international medical industry, would have to be stopped immediately. But stopping organ transplants on the mere grounds that it kills people, they said, would be “extremely harmful and unreasonable from an ethical point of view.”
It is because of ethics that I have always been against organ transplantation. I do not see how a desperately ill person can, in good conscience, actively hope for a healthy and vibrant person to die so that they can get their organ(s). If I were in that position, I wouldn't be able to justify such a desire. I have written on the back of my driver's license that I am not an organ donor.
“Here we are dealing with human beings, with our neighbours, brothers and sisters, the poor and invalids . . . unproductive - perhaps! But have they, therefore, lost the right to live? Have you or I the right to exist only because we are ‘productive’?”
The crux of the abortion movement has always been that the baby being killed has no intrinsic right to life because it, in fact, is useless--worse than useless, because not only is it not productive, it demands time and energy from another person, whose time and energy *could* be used productively if it weren't being expended on that baby. (And the message to the women having the abortions is just as clear: society has a right to throw them away, too, when they cease being productive.)
China does this to enemies of the State and criminals. China seems to be the elitists’ new ideal for “rule.”
“terminal” sedation can be an ethical treatment for those in terrible pain, because you are treating the pain, not giving it to kill someone. Pius XII said that giving large amounts of pain killers was ethical, even if it shortened life, when it was done to treat the patient’s pain.
However, terminal sedation where they keep increasing the amount until you die of overdose is killing, and so is giving huge amounts of narcotics to put non terminal patients in a coma (e.g. as an alternative for hip fracture).
I bring up hip fracture because when Obama’s grandmother had both cancer and a hip fracture, they fixed the fracture but she died soon afterward...but in the discussions about health care cost, he mentioned that maybe in the interest of cost control, they should have done an “alternative” treatment. Alternative treatment is let the hip heal itself (which we sometimes have to do) but is more painful for the patient)...or terminal sedation...
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