Posted on 05/01/2011 9:30:48 AM PDT by wagglebee
Rome, Italy, Apr 30, 2011 / 05:03 am (CNA).- A proposal to allow premature or sick newborn babies to die even when their life would be deemed worth living by medical staff has been condemned by a leading member of the Pontifical Academy for Life.
Doctor Carlo Bellieni says the suggestion being made by the Oxford-based physician James Wilkinson is both “flawed” and “an erroneous way of considering life.”
Dr. Wilkinson outlines his controversial argument in the American Journal of Bioethics. “The prevailing official view is that treatment may be withdrawn only if the burdens in an infant’s future life outweigh the benefits. ... I conclude that it is justifiable in some circumstances for parents and doctors to decide to allow an infant to die even though the infant’s life would be worth living,” Dr. Wilkinson wrote.
But as Dr. Bellieni explained to CNA, such a suggestion makes for bad ethics and poor patient care. “Firstly, babies are not the property of their parents. Secondly, at birth parents are often stressed and full of pain and suffering. The mother has the pain of childbirth. The father has the shock and stress of being faced with a very premature baby. When you’re in such pain and stress, you’re not really free to make clear-minded decisions that are so important for your offspring.”
Most importantly, Dr. Bellieni said, “the decision about life should only be taken on an objective basis and in the interest of the patient, not in the interests of a third party.”
Dr. Bellieni, who is a Director of the Neonatal Intensive Therapy Unit at Siena University Hospital, is internationally recognized as an expert in the field of neonatal care. In addition to being a member of the Pontifical Academy for Life, he is also the Secretary of the Bioethics Committee of the Italian Pediatrics Society.
Although the Italian neonatalogist said he doesn’t know whether hospitals in the Western world are actually practicing Dr. Wilkinson’s radical approach, he pointed towards recent research in Canada suggesting that newborn babies are now receiving less guarantees of treatment than adults. “It’s a very sad scenario. I believe that babies should receive more care than other patients but many philosophers now believe that newborns are not persons and so they actually are receiving fewer guarantees than older people.”
“Even when burdens do seem to be high, for example in the case of severe disability, this is not a sufficient reason to withhold life-saving treatments. After all, a disabled baby has a full right to life too,” Dr. Bellieni stressed.
“Dr. Wilkinson claims that the prevailing clinical view is contrary to this. If that is the case then it’s very worrying indeed and we cannot possibly accept such a viewpoint as ethical.”
All life is "worth living" you jackass!
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Wow,, glad we figured out THAT brain teaser. Can you imagine going back a few hundred years, and telling a Paope the kind of things he would need to tell people in the future are wrong? Freaking amazing,,,
And how quickly a right to die and to euthanasia becomes a duty. When the parent has a right to starve a sick child,, how long until not doing so is the dreaded “selfish”.
I think the story of Solomon might be appropriate.
“Dr. Wilkinson outlines his controversial argument in the American Journal of Bioethics”
AMERICAN,,, Folks, when you have national health care, or “single payer”, the patient is no longer a profit center, but SOLIDLY becomes a COST center. And then the game quickly becomes cutting costs.
The current system is designed to make money by keeping you alive. Obamacare and NHS are designed to spend as little as possible.
The Death Eater mindset considers it “justifiable” to kill anyone who can’t physically keep you from killing him, and to “allow to die” anyone who can’t keep himself alive strictly by his own efforts.
Welcome to the war of all against all. It’s rather comforting to know that “bioethicists” will get awfully hungry when the SHTF, since they’re not much use with a gun or a hoe.
The current system is designed to make money by keeping you alive. Obamacare and NHS are designed to spend as little as possible.
My firstborn son would be dead under that system.
Looking forward to the Church opening up it’s checkbook to cover the costs.
Have you applied to be on one of Zero's death panels?
A better start would be to take every cent away from the abortion factories of Planned Parenthood and use that for care rather than for murder. After that, we can figure out just how much money we send overseas for contraception and abortion and redirect that to care as well.
We're paying collectively for the lack of morals people have so acting like the Church rather than all of us collectively should pay for the morals people have is hypocritical.
No, I just don’t want to pay for anybody else’s health care. You see, I’m against socialized medicine.
THis already happens in countires with heathcare provided by the government.In the UK if a baby is born prior to 24 weeks they are told to hold it until it dies.With advances in neonatal care babies born at 21.5 weks can now survive sometimes.The odds aren’t in their favor but some can and do survive.
Well, the article said NOTHING about costs, it dealt with the barbaric idea that parents should be allowed to withhold health care from babies who aren't even dying.
My experience has been that death mongers who support this ALWAYS bring up cost as the reason. Libertarians on FR claim to be against socialized medicine, but only ever seem to propose the medicine part of it, they get excited about the prospect of killing people for financial reasons.
There is a bizarre medical paradox that came out when a State decided to get a handle on its charity medical care.
It created, with input from as many groups as possible, a list of medical procedures with a double ranking. One ranking was how effective a treatment was, how it improved quality of life; and the other was how expensive it was, whether it worked or not.
So at the head of the list was cleft palate. An inexpensive surgery that almost always worked well, and immensely improved the lives of those who got it.
At the bottom of the list was a surgery to replace the internal organs of an extremely premature infant. It cost millions of dollars and almost never worked—the infant almost always died.
So they decided to no longer offer that last treatment, and instead as policy, to use the money to provide for prenatal care for thousands of women.
But here is the irony: with that prenatal care, the number of extremely premature infants needing internal organ replacements dropped to zero.
Personhood bump.
New tagline...
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