“Human Non-Person” (Terri Schiavo Is Not A Person-Bioethicist Bill Allen)

National Review Online ^ | March 29, 2005 | Wesley J. Smith

[BigCinBigD]

Behold the coming of the new Nazis.

[UCANSEE2]

Bioethecist= Scientist who decides if it is ETHICAL to do Scientific Experiments on humans.

Euthanasia= Legal Suicide, but you must have a doctor's permission slip.

[Robert A Cook PE]

Good point.

[UCANSEE2]

Then you just wasted your time posting to this thread.

[chimera]

I despair of enough Americans waking up to this new reality before it is too late.

They might, but I fear it will be in their last moments of consciousness after they have involuntarily taken the needle.

A nation is pretty much doomed as a moral society when it finds the killing of innocent people to be acceptable. There is ample evidence that this has already occurred, and probably long ago. The ongoing holocaust of abortion, which the toll now approaching 50 million dead since 1973, is the most horrific indicator. Terri Schindler's impending execution at the order of a court of this land is simply the most visible sign. I had hoped, since human beings seem to be creatures of sight more than anything, that her public suffering and passion, as tragic as it is, might have some positive outcome in stirring public indignation at the spectacle of the slaughter of innocents. Sadly, given the polls, it seems to have merely fed the bloodlust of the culture of death.

[UCANSEE2]

Why is it so many of these bioethicists come across as charter members of the Hemlock Society?

Because these 'new' positions that people are being APPOINTED to, BIOETHICS SPECIALIST, or some such title, are the new wave.

The ones who will judge the quality of human life.

The ones who have the least respect for it, in that they are scientists, and experimentation is their primary goal, not free will, and life.

Everything they determine is ETHICALLY OK will be judged so because it is to advance SCIENCE!

Rationalization is our new GOD!~

[Robert A Cook PE]

Thus Peter Singer of Princeton argues that unless an organism is self-aware over time, the entity in question is a non-person. The British academic John Harris, the Sir David Alliance professor of bioethics at the University of Manchester, England, has defined a person as “a creature capable of valuing its own existence.” Other bioethicists argue that the basic threshold of personhood should include the capacity to experience desire.

So, if Terri desires water, she's in a Permanent Vegetative State (because Greer got the Schindler's attorney to agree to that as a "finding of fact" several years ago.)

But "does she value her own existence?" She's fighting for her life, I'd say she values her existence!

Gee, I wonder. 15 years deliberately withholding therapy -> I KNOW Micheal only values her dead.

[TheDon]

So much for "Never Again". We have dehumanized the unborn, now we have dehumanized the mentally disabled. Hmmmm....I wonder who is next?

[huskerone]

It goes to the heart of what I have always said, first in the context of abortion, and now, the pending extermination of "useless eaters" and "life unworthy of life". And that is, whenever a people insist on subjecting the designation of one's humanity to narrow definitions of one sort or another, the result can only be measureless destruction.

I have a co-worker who is scared for his two children (one adopted) they both have spinal bifida and have reduced mental capabilities. He and his wife fear that if they cannot support their children and the numerous medical needs that someday the state will decide to pull their feeding tubes and let them die like Terri.

We have had several fund raisers for this couple through the years to help them defray the medical costs, but someday it may not be enough or they fear the insurance company will drop them.

I use to think this was not a plausible outcome, but after the last month it is very much a reality this couple and this society faces!

[TheDon]

30,000,000? We have killed 40,000,000 unborn, non-humans in America, and counting...

[zippee]

Wow. Aren't many mentally retarded people able to vote?

[uglybiker]

Blood-boiler bump.

[Robert A Cook PE]

No, and Felos/Greer knew that.

So THEY deliberately prevented ANY cameras (by strip-searching even her parents!) from being brought into the room the past days!

See?

Now, did Felos take his own camera in her room to record her death as his personal record of a snuff film? (My opinion? Yes. If in nothing else, we KNOW he he did record her passion, her misery in his mind.)

[TheDon]

It is all rather bizarre. Soon we'll have reality television shows where those declared non-human will be killed by contestants.

[Kryptonite]

And killing isn’t the half of it. Some of the same bioethicists who have been telling us how right and moral it is to dehydrate Terri Schiavo have also urged that people like Terri — that is, human non-persons — be harvested or otherwise used as mere instrumentalities. Bioethicist big-wig Tom Beauchamp of Georgetown University has suggested that “because many humans lack properties of personhood or are less than full persons, they…might be aggressively used as human research subjects or sources of organs.”

Never stopped at the human nonperson angle - Beauchamp and I'm sure many similar death merchants are now willing to go on record with the human "less than full" persons angle.

Absolutely horrific. The Holocaust immediately comes to mind.

[Lovergirl]

Yea, real classy guy./sarcasm.

[TheDon]

Agreed.

[axel f]

Man. Between this and the ever-increasing news reports about how death by starvation is peaceful, I am really getting spooked.

[fishtank]

[chimera]

IOW, bread and circuses...