Posted on 02/08/2012 1:15:20 PM PST by NYer
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 rise of the organ “donor” gangs....
first we abandoned morality and now even simple ethics are obstacles to the insane radical left
The novelist Walker Percy saw all this coming 20 years ago. From his comments on his last novel, “The Thanatos Syndrome”:
“I tried to show how, while truth should prevail, it is a disaster when only one kind of truth prevails at the expense of another. If only one kind of truth prevails — the abstract and technical truth of science — then nothing stands in the way of a demeaning of and a destruction of human life for what appear to be reasonable short-term goals.”
Geez . . . I wonder to what this is leading us . . .
They’ve already managed to convince a substantial portion of the population that to kill one’s own unborn children is an inalienable RIGHT....
Gee, what an old-fashioned, out-of-date, un-post-modern concept.
How about we do away with the norm that patients should pay doctors for their services? Or that the medical profession is somehow respectable? Or that men and women who save human lives are in any way worth more to a society than the men and women who clean our toilets?
Yes, let's discard all those old, worn-out ethics and replace them with a new hierarchy of enlightened, humanist, utilitarian values! After all, what does God know?
Did St. Paul get a look at XXI Century America?
I'm not so sure I would want a transplant from the OWS crowd.
"For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature:
And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet."
They do produce Democratic votes.
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong a Duke University bioethicist and Franklin G. Miller, an ethicist with the National Institutes of Health - start with them.
A good execution method. Put the criminal under, remove all useful parts, drain the blood for transfusions, discard ramainder. Much better than poisoning or cooking recyclable body parts.
The novelist Larry Niven coined the term “organlegger” about forty years ago (early 1970s). In one story, even a traffic ticket could get you broken down for parts.
Since I am retired, I guess that makes me an "unproductive citizen." Time to load some more pmags.
(With just minimal editing, this could be utterly hilarious, while horrifying those who proposed it. Edits in ALL CAPS.)
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 BLACK PEOPLE,” two leading U.S. bioethicists have said.
In an article titled, “What Makes Killing BLACK PEOPLE 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 PEOPLE JUST BECAUSE THEY ARE BLACK. This norm is often seen as absolute and universal. In contrast, we have argued that killing BLACK PEOPLE by itself is not morally wrong, although it is still morally wrong to cause total disability, MAKING BLACK PEOPLE PERMANENT WELFARE RECIPIENTS.”
The problem with killing BLACK PEOPLE is “not that the act causes loss of life or consciousness but rather that the act causes loss of all THEIR ABILITY TO PLAY SPORTS.”
But the article’s authors admit that the situation is already grave from the point of view of traditional medical ethics. The so-called “BLACK 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 FROM DRUNK OR DRUGGED BLACK PEOPLE, already a multi-billion dollar international medical industry, would have to be stopped immediately.
But stopping THE TAKING OF ORGANS FROM BLACK PEOPLE on the mere grounds that it kills BLACK people, they said, would be “extremely harmful and unreasonable from an ethical point of view.”
I think... we did not win WWII. We did not win the Cold War. At best it was a delaying action. Apparently Mankind has a “kill switch” designed so that if we got too big for our britches, we would self-destruct. It’s like a swirling storm of pure devilishness out there now and there seems to be no way for the moral majority to put these people back on their heels.
Yep. How long before eugenics is said to be perfectly acceptable?
Mark
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