A group of Belgian doctors are harvesting “high quality” organs from patients who have been euthanased. This is not a secret project, but one which they described openly at a conference organised by the Belgian Royal Medical Academy in December. Posted on 01/26/2011 3:57:05 AM PST by markomalley
A group of Belgian doctors are harvesting “high quality” organs from patients who have been euthanased. This is not a secret project, but one which they described openly at a conference organised by the Belgian Royal Medical Academy in December.
In a PowerPoint presentation, Dirk Ysebaert, Dirk Van Raemdonck, Michel Meurisse, of the University Hospitals Of Antwerp, Leuven And Liège, showed that about 20% of the 705 people who died through euthanasia (officially) in 2008 were suffering from neuromuscular disorders whose organs are relatively high quality for transplanting to other patients. This represents a useful pool of organs which could help to remedy a shortage of organs in Belgium (as everywhere else).
It is not clear from the presentation how many patients participated in their scheme. However, in a 2008 report, Belgian doctors explained that three patients had been euthanased between 2005 and 2007 and had agreed to donate their organs.
Euthanasia for organ transplant is a bit different from normal euthanasia, the doctors say, because they prefer that patients die in hospital rather than at home.
They have developed a protocol for the procedure. There has to be a strict separation between the euthanasia request, the euthanasia procedure, and the organ procurement. The donor and his (or her) relatives have to consent. The euthanasia is performed by a neurologist or psychiatrist and two house physicians. Organ retrieval begins after clinical diagnosis of death by the three physicians. And, of course, staff participation is voluntary.
This seems like the ultimate in utilitarian compassion: make paralysed people feel useful by killing them for their organs. It’s something to look forward to if euthanasia ever get legalised. ~ thanks to Carinne Brochier, of l'Institut Européen de Bioéthique, in Brussels.
Those Europeans are so much more cosmopolitan, worldly and compassionate than we are. We shoud emulate them.
Outrageous!!! I’ll have to show this to my ex (he’s a transplant surgeon). It’ll make him barf. I really think he needs to get out of transplant surgery before the Obama admin starts forcing docs to do things like this.
BODY SNATCHERS !!!
LLS
Boujold was a hottie back in the day!
LLS
“Just think, granpa, you’d be helping someone you don’t know. It won’t hurt a bit. You’ll just be going to sleep.”
In a narcissistic, materialistic world, this is no surprise.
[1] Steve Gilbert at Sweetness and Light thought that Obama would nominate Peter Singer (the Utilitarian) as his Health Czar:
...By the way, in case Mr. Singer’s name doesn’t strike a bell, he is that famed bioethicist who believes in sex with animals and abortion, euthanasia and infanticide for humans. Maybe Mr. Obama will make him his Health Care Czar.
([BTW- Marxist philosophers have used utilitarianism as arguments for communism and socialism.])
Maybe Obama just hasn’t gotten around to it yet. But he has appointed other left-wing radicals:
Let’s not forget that he nominated Cass Sunstein to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs at the Office of Budget and Management. Sunstein has argued in favor of outlawing sport hunting and meat-eating, and written that animals should be allowed to file lawsuits “with human beings as their representatives.” Obama nominee: Animals can sue people http://www.onenewsnow.com/Politics/Default.aspx?id=614400
And look who he appointed as his “science” czar:
“John Holdren, Obama’s Science Czar, says: Forced abortions and mass sterilization needed to save the planet” Details: http://zombietime.com/john_holdren/
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[2] One of Obama’s Biggest Radicals - When Barack Obama nominated John P. Holdren as his Science Adviser last December 20, the president-elect stated “promoting science isn’t just about providing resources” but “ensuring that facts and evidence are never twisted or obscured by politics or ideology.” In nominating John Holdren, his words could scarcely have taken a more Orwellian ring. More details: http://www.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=34198
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[3] Then we have another left-wing radical, Dr. Ezkiel Emanuel (brother of White House chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel) who is the Chair of the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health. It is likely that he would be on any governmental panel that decides what medical procedures are allowed on whom. He has written at length that the elderly should get less care, that Americans are too enamored with high-tech care.
More about him in this WSJ interview on FNC yesterday here:
McCaughey: Well, Congress is accountable, and seniors would certainly raise a lot of fury if suddenly they could not avoid the crippling affects of arthritis by getting a knee replacement. And the fact is that the president likened this proposal to a base-closing commission so it would be immune from those popular impacts.
But the fact is, I don’t believe we can count on the doctors that would be appointed to this to make the right decisions because, for example, the doctors that the president has already chosen to be his chief health advisers are ardent advocates of limiting care for the elderly. Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, for example—brother of president’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel—highly educated man who has written extensively on his views that the elderly should get less care, that Americans are too enamored with high-tech care, and that people who have incurable illnesses—and he uses specifically the example of dementia—should not be guaranteed health care because they no longer contribute to society. These are views that most of us don’t share. JULY 27, 2009 Critical Condition—The full transcript http://sbk.online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203609204574312451234786752.html
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[4] How Much Is a Year of Your Life Worth?
By David Catron on 7.24.09 @ 6:09AM
http://spectator.org/archives/2009/07/24/how-much-is-a-year-of-your-lif
All advocates of socialized medicine, including the President and his congressional accomplices, believe that government-imposed rationing is necessary to control health care costs. Having little faith in the judgment of individual patients and even less in the workings of the market, they are convinced that only the state is capable of efficiently allocating our medical resources. Very few of these people, however, have the courage of their convictions. With a few notable exceptions, they vehemently deny that they are for rationing. Indeed, as a matter of general strategy, they have done their best to exclude the “R” word from the reform debate. President Obama has gone so far as to explicitly to admonish his political allies “to avoid terms like ‘rationing’” while promoting the Democrat health care agenda.
But, make no mistake about it, rationing will be an integral component of Obamacare. Last Sunday the President’s budget chief admitted , “I’m not prepared to rule it out,” when pressed for a straight answer on the issue. And another of Obama’s advisors famously frets about the insistence of American physicians on doing “everything for the patient regardless of cost.” Thus, stopping such costly interventions will be a primary mission of the “Federal Coordinating Council for Effectiveness Research,” a new hive of health care apparatchiks created by the infamous “porkulus” bill. This new bureaucracy is intended to operate like its European counterparts, meaning that it will assign a monetary value to your life and deny your care if you contract a malady whose cost-of-treatment exceeds that amount.
If you are under the impression that it is impossible to calculate the value of a human life, you are obviously not a progressive policy expert or health care bureaucrat. This calculation, so elusive for philosophers and sages throughout the millennia, is child’s play for such people. They have, in fact, already devised a formula for pricing out your life. It is called the “quality-adjusted-life-year” (QALY), and it assigns a numerical value to a year of life. A year of perfect health, for example, is given a value of 1.0 while a year of sub-optimum health is rated between 0 and 1. If you are confined to a wheelchair, a year of your life might be valued at half that of your ambulatory neighbor. If you are blind or deaf, you also score low. All that remains is to assign a specific dollar value to the QALY and, voilà, your life has a price tag.
Imagine, for a moment, what the harvest would have been had this soulless valuation system been applied throughout the West for the past three or four centuries. QALY would have rated John Milton, blind at the time he wrote Paradise Lost, at considerably less than 1. And the hearing-impaired Beethoven would have been lucky to score 0.5 on the QALY scale. For a more modern example, think of Stephen Hawking. Hawking is arguably the most gifted scientist since Isaac Newton, but QALY would value his life at very nearly zero. There would, however, have been winners in the life-rating lottery. The life of Ted Bundy, a good-looking, articulate young man in perfect physical health, would have been valued at a perfect 1.
And, lest you imagine that QALY is mere academic concept unlikely to be applied in the real world, it is already being used in countries burdened with socialized medicine. In Great Britain, for example, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) uses “cost per QALY” to determine if patients should receive expensive treatment or drugs. It was with this formula that NICE calculated the precise amount six months of an average Brit’s life is worth. As the Wall Street Journal reports, “NICE currently holds that, except in unusual cases, Britain cannot afford to spend more than about $22,000 to extend a life by six months.” In other words, patients whose country has guaranteed them “free” health care are in some cases refused treatment because the incremental cost per additional QALY is too high.
Nonetheless, despite the obvious moral dubiousness of QALY, some progressive policy experts openly advocate its use in the United States. Princeton Bioethics Professor Peter Singer recommended this approach just last week in the New York Times Magazine: “If a reformed U.S. health care system explicitly accepted rationing, as I have argued it should, QALYs could play a similar role in the U.S.” Singer is untroubled that some severely ill patients will go without treatment simply because it is expensive: “A QALY approach may then lead us to give priority to helping others who are not so badly off and whose conditions are less expensive to treat.” That the “badly off” patient may have been taxed all his life to support “universal” health care evidently has no meaning for the Professor.
Dr. Robert Wachter, Associate Chairman of the Department of Medicine at UC San Francisco, is likewise unconcerned about such “badly off” patients. Wachter writes at his blog that Singer’s position would amount to mere common sense “in a society of grown-ups.” In an apparent attempt to personify every “arrogant doctor” cliché known to man, Wachter pompously lectures his readers to the effect that government-imposed rationing is inevitable while heaping scorn on the Great Unwashed for daring to entertain alternative viewpoints: “Will the society that brings you Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck (or, I’m beginning to think, some of our Democratic representatives) deal with it in an effective, mature way? I truly doubt it.”
Wachter, like many progressives, has a gift for unintentional irony. The real obstacle to an “effective” public discourse about rationing has nothing to do with talk radio hosts, television personalities, Blue Dog Democrats, or the immaturity of American society in general. It is, rather, the moral cowardice of the President and his allies in Congress that prevents a serious debate about rationing. If Barack Obama, Max Baucus, Nancy Pelosi, and the rest of their fellow travelers were honest, they would admit that they agree with Singer and Wachter. They would look us in the eye and tell us that the only way to control health care costs is for Washington to impose a Draconian rationing scheme that effectively puts a price on each of our heads.
Such a confession would certainly spark a vigorous national conversation. And this discussion would no doubt last until November of 2010, when the voters would give the Democrats the bum’s rush they so richly deserve
bttt
Anybody dying that needs an organ I would think... but only after irradiating it.
LLS
More (2005):
10 ideas on the way out By 2040, many things we take for granted will no longer exist
The Dallas Morning News ^ | 11-27-2005 | Various
Posted on 11/27/2005 1:56:54 PM EST by 1066AD
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1529375/posts
The sanctity of life
By Peter Singer
During the next 35 years, the traditional view of the sanctity of human life will collapse under pressure from scientific, technological and demographic developments. By 2040, it may be that only a rump of hard-core, know-nothing religious fundamentalists will defend the view that every human life, from conception to death, is sacrosanct.
(Excerpt) Read more at dallasnews.com ...
Peter Singer advocates killing babies up to a year old, if they have any physical defects. He also advocates the practice of bestiality.
In the old days, he would have been considered a Nazi. He still resembles a Nazi, regardless of the approval he currently receives from the deluded left.
Princeton University gave him a distinguished chair. That doesn’t say much for Princeton.
4 posted on 11/27/2005 2:01:28 PM EST by Cicero (Marcus Tullius)
“Singer is a utilitarian. For utilitarians, the moral task is to create utility — to increase the amount of happiness in the world, or at least decrease the amount of pain. If curing cancer requires doing research that requires the death of ten infants, then the infants should be sacrificed for the cause. After Princeton hired him in 1999, a graduate wrote to the Princeton Alumni Weekly, “Nothing I have seen or heard epitomizes the decline of Western civilization so much as the hiring of Peter Singer.” Singer is one of the few thinkers, like Darwin and Freud, who within their own lifetimes have changed the way people think. ....it’s preferences, rather than human life, that we ought to value... if we have rights only insofar as we have preferences, then what about those humans, like the severely retarded, who lack preferences? What about newborn infants, who prefer to eat, excrete, and avoid pain, but prefer little else? This brings us to Singer’s second startling conclusion: doctors and parents should be permitted in some circumstances to kill humans. We ought, Singer writes, to replace the old dictum that all human life has equal worth with a First New Commandment: Recognize that the worth of human life varies. ..I asked him whether he would extend the “cutoff” for euthanasia to, say, three years old, an age when children still have rather few preferences. “A three-year-old is a gray case,” he said. .. Many philosophers, like Brown’s Dan Brock and Tufts’s Norman Daniels, agree in good part with Singer. The philosopher James Rachels made many of Singer’s points before he did. And Bentham got there before everybody, even on seemingly modern issues like animal rights. “As a theoretical contributor, he’s not the most philosophically significant,” says Shelly Kagan of Yale, who often agrees with Singer. “But he moves the reader, shows the reader what’s already inherent in the reader’s own beliefs. ..” http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=2659
A very sick individual.
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Peter Singer
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Singer
As long as they don’t call it a “Death Panel”, it should be fine.
Colorado has proposed a law which presumes you have GIVEN CONSENT TO BE A DONER, unless you actively opt out.
This, in combination with Obamacare disincentives to save and extend life, should make us all nervous.
Isn’t it crazy that most of these sickos are people who are vegan-vegetarians? I guess when you don’t appreciate he death of the animal that gave it’s life for you hamburger you fail to appreciate the life of the person who is eating said burger.
Maybe this guy is missing some vital amino acid that humans can only get by eating meat because we are omnivores, who are mostly carnivorous.
"....The New Yorker calls Peter Singer, the world’s “most influential living philosopher.” It is Singer’s belief that “middle class families in the United States have a moral obligation to pay 33 percent of the first $30,000 they make to combat poverty around the globe.” After the first $30,000, they should pay 100 percent. He explicitly rejects the theory of property rights as an "unacceptable ethical view," and argues that certain animals are "persons" that have “the same special claim to be protected” as humans. He also maintains that infanticide is in some cases morally obligatory (Larry Arn, in a special edition of the Hillsdale College Imprimus).
"Singer would undoubtedly find my allegory of two kinds of humans to be repellant. This is because, like all radical secularists, he knows that there are actually no humans. For equating animals and humans does not elevate animals so much as denigrate human beings. Or at least those of us into whom God breathed a living soul. ..."
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Related:
"On an individual level, natural law holds that there is a Third [vertical] Party, beyond the biological mother and father, involved in the act of human creation. Your two parents generated your material [horizontal] substance, the goop and soup of you; that much could be said of any mammal. But according to natural law, God expresses His interest in every human being through the act of ensoulment -- the creation of an individual soul [(¶)] -- by virtue of which the human being becomes a person. And from that quality of personhood flow the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
Exactly. bttt
“Christianity is our foe. If animal rights is to succeed, we must destroy the Judeo-Christian religious tradition.” ~ Peter Singer (the “caring” utilitarian)
Source:
The Faces of Animal Rights Terrorists: http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:lPyxQBL7QvwJ:www.civicusa.org/animalrightsterrorists/id11.html+peter+singer+tre+arrow+&hl=en
Doctors consider this perfectly ethical I suppose as long as they get these organs for free.
If they paid the donors family that wouldn’t be ethical.
It is perfectly ethical for a Doctor to charge $200,000 dollars for a transplant as long as the donor doesn’t get a penny. It’s nice to have free parts lying around. Wish the parts to keep my old car running were free.
"....Are there limits to the scientific method, or is it absolute? Clearly the answers are "yes" and "no," respectively. In fact, as Jaki points out, "one may rightly say that there is nothing so important as to ascertain the limits to which science can rightfully be put to use."
"For example, Darwinians inform us that human beings are just replicating machines, or the gene's way of making more genes.
"If they truly believe that, is it permissible to treat a human being as a machine? Why not? Just because we "feel" it would be bad? What if other people such as Peter Singer or Adolf Hitler feel it would be a good idea to murder certain people?
"There are very sharp limits to the scientific method, one of which is that it specifically applies to the relative, not the absolute.
"Another intrinsic limit would be Gödel's theorems. Others include quantifiability: "science ceases to be competent whenever a proposition is such as to have no quantitative bearing" (Jaki). This is why, when the scientist forces his paradigm into areas that intrinsically elude its competence, he always sounds stupid, like the adolescent kos kid or middlebrow Lizards.
"For if the scientistic mind were capable of understanding these subtle metaphysical matters, they wouldn't be true.
"To put it another way, there are times that it just isn't possible to descend to the low intellectual level of the Lizard or bonehead materialist. Rather, they must ascend (or evolve!) with a discontinuous leap upward. This upward leap is called "faith." But it is every bit as justified as putting one's faith in the teacher of a subject one doesn't yet understand.
"Understanding will come, if only you give up your pride and allow it to. It is hardly blind faith, but backed by the full faith and credit of brilliant transpersonal visionaries who have seen much further, deeper, and higher than you ever will with your tiny lizard brain. That is a guarantee. ...."
"Science can only operate within a matrix of a freedom that it is powerless to explain. ..."
“Soylent Green is made out of People!”
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