Posted on 02/11/2012 2:39:32 PM PST by wagglebee
If you want to see where our culture may next go off the rails, read professional journals. There, in often eye-crossing and passive arcane prose of the medical intelligentsia, you will discover an astonishing level of antipathy to the sanctity of human life — to the point now that some advocate killing the profoundly disabled for their organs.
Case in point: “What Makes Killing Wrong?” an article published in the January 19, 2012 edition of the Journal of Medical Ethics. The authors argue that death and total disability are morally indistinguishable, and therefore harvesting organs from living disabled patients is not morally wrong. Bioethicists Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, of Duke University, and Franklin G. Miller, from the National Institutes of Health’s Department of Bioethics (which should really get the alarm bells ringing!) arrive at their shocking (for most of us) conclusion by claiming that murdering the hypothetical “Betty” isn’t wrong because it kills her, but rather, because it “makes her unable to do anything, including walking, talking, and even thinking and feeling.”
How do they get from deconstructing the definition of death to harvesting the disabled? First, they change the scenario so that Betty is not killed but severely brain damaged to the point that she is “totally disabled.” But their definition of that term encompasses hundreds of thousands of living Americans who are our mothers, fathers, children, aunts and siblings, uncles, friends and cousins — people with profound disabilities like that experienced by Terri Schiavo and my late Uncle Bruno as he lived through the late stages of his Alzheimer’s disease:
Betty has mental states, at least intermittently and temporarily, so she is not dead by any standard or plausible criterion. Still, she is universally disabled because she has no control over anything that goes on in her body or mind.
Since Betty “is no worse off being dead than totally disabled,” they opine, it is no worse “to kill Betty than to totally disable her.” Not only that, but according to the authors, “there is nothing bad about death or killing other than disability or disabling,” and since she is already so debilitated, then nothing wrong is done by harvesting her organs and thus ending her biological existence. And thus, in the space of not quite five pages, killing the innocent ceases to be wrong and the intrinsic dignity of human life is thrown out the window, transforming vulnerable human beings into objectified and exploitable human resources.
Alas, Sinnott-Armstrong and Miller are not on the fringe. And while they certainly don’t represent the unanimous view, they can hardly be called radical — at least by the standards of the medical/bioethical intelligentsia. Indeed, for more than a decade articles have been published in the world’s most notable medical and bioethics journals arguing in favor of killing profoundly disabled patients for their organs. Here is just a sampling:
● Journal of Medical Ethics: “In the longer run, the medical profession and society … should be prepared to accept the reality and justifiability of life terminating acts in medicine in the context of stopping life sustaining treatment and performing vital organ transplantation.”
● New England Journal of Medicine: “Whether death occurs as the result of ventilator withdrawal or organ procurement, the ethically relevant precondition is valid consent by the patient or surrogate. With such consent, there is no harm or wrong done in retrieving vital organs before death, provided that anesthesia is administered.”
● Critical Care Medicine: “We propose that individuals who desire to donate their organs and who are either neurologically devastated or imminently dying should be able to donate their organs without first being declared dead.”
It is important to note here that transplant medicine remains an ethical enterprise and that doctors are not yet doing the deed. But if we want to keep it that way, it is important that these proposals not be allowed to germinate.
Here’s the good news. Sunlight is the great disinfectant. Most people will oppose killing for organs. Thus, the best way to prevent this dark agenda from ever becoming the legal public policy is to expose it in popular media every time it is proposed.
Wesley J. Smith, an attorney and author, is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism.
This explains perfectly what the culture of death is trying to do to all of humanity.
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Remember jackals. . . Karma's a bitch!
once you have no problem with killing the unborn... harvesting organs from the infirm is small step
when does it become self defense to protect ones family from those seeking todo them harm?
Once you posit that you can murder the innocent for the benefit of the living and you can murder based on the inconvenience of location then you have stricken down all law regarding murder.
You can no longer logically condemn any murder.
When you have reached that state then why would it be wrong for governments to murder anyone inconvenient for them. At least under the Nazi's and Stalin they were sufficiently ashamed of their actions to try to keep them hidden. The new breed wants to declare evil good and shout it from the housetops.
Decades ago there was a Quincy episode dealing with this (Quincy was a “medical examiner”...a doctor who works for the police to try to figure out why someone died). In that episode, they raised the question of whether a person was declared dead earlier than necessary, because he was carrying an organ donor card (i.e., it’s critical to harvest organs as soon as possible from a dying person, before they ‘spoil’). They concluded, no, he was allowed to die completely before they went after his organs. While that may have been the conclusion on that episode, I immediately terminated my organ-donor check box on my driver’s license.
These organ “donor” organizations harass families at the hospital so they can make big $$ off the organs from their loved ones. Nothing more than typical leftist culture of death.
“These organ “donor” organizations harass families at the hospital so they can make big $$ off the organs from their loved ones. Nothing more than typical leftist culture of death.”
I had no clue, but not surprised. Appreciate you giving me the heads up.
Just interested. So if a person has been in an automobile accident, and the paramedics put that person on life support at the scene, is then later determined there is no brain activity and the person will die if removed, life support is removed and organs are harvested, is this considered euthanasia?
There would be no organ waiting lists if it were legal for donors and their heirs to be compensated for organs provided for transplant.
I think you will find life support is not pulled before the organs are harvested. The organs they want most need the blood flowing to them.
As far as selling one’s organs. It would be disasterous. The poor would go first and granny would be expected to go next to save any inheritance.
It’s simply cannibalism.
My husband was given a heart transplant 18 months ago. He was dying, they had done all they could do. He was then placed on the list a1 status.
We are not wealthy, we have no connections. We prayed and God gave us his answer. Every day we are grateful to the donor for having the courage to be a donor. We know very little about the circumstances of his or her death, we just know there was a brain death. Rather than a vital organ being disposed of at death, it gave life. Our family s once again whole and we are truly blessed. I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that this was a gift from God.
Everyone is entitled to their own beliefs.
My belief is this is the ultimate redistribution program. I question if this is God’s intention.
Wait until new organs can actually extend a person’s life beyond a normal lifespan. Larry Niven talked about this in some of his sci-fi, and not in a good way. From wiki:
“...the problem led to a repressive society almost unrecognizable by today’s standards. Since the average citizens wished to extend their lives, the world government sought to increase the supply by using condemned criminals to supply the organ banks. When this failed to meet the demand, citizens would vote for the death penalty for more and more trivial crimes. First violent crimes, then theft, tax evasion, false advertising, and even traffic violations became punishable by the organ banks.”
He was talking about “organ legging” back in the late 60’s.
Freegards
Has anybody read all the pages (thousands) of obamacare..............or are there more surprises????
Dr. Frankenstein is still alive and works for the National Institutes of Health.
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