Posted on 05/08/2015 7:09:27 AM PDT by wagglebee
Utilitarian bioethicist Peter Singer has often come under fire for his views on infanticide from pro-life groups. But after a recent radio interview, he was sternly rebuked by a US government agency, the National Council on Disability.
Professor Singer was promoting his book, The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically, on Aaron Klein Investigative Radio, a show broadcast in New York and Philadelphia.
Klein elicited from Singer the claim that government-funded health care should include rationing and that we should acknowledge the necessity of “intentionally ending the lives of severely disabled infants.”
This, says the NCD, is “a return to eugenics”.
Singer went on to say, “I don’t want my health insurance premiums to be higher so that infants who can experience zero quality of life can have expensive treatments.”
Should severely disabled infants be killed to reduce health-care costs? Singer did not respond directly, but he said that caring for them should not necessarily be covered by a national health service.
[If] “you had a health-care system in which governments were trying to say, ‘Look, there are some things that don’t provide enough benefits given the costs of those treatments. And if we didn’t do them we would be able to do a lot more good for other people who have better prospects,’ then yes, I think it would be reasonable for governments to say, ‘This treatment is not going to be provided on the national health service if it’s a country with a national health service. Or in the United States on Medicare or Medicaid.’”
This outraged the NDC.
In contrast to Singer’s ivory tower speculations, the United States Supreme Court has acknowledged that "society's accumulated myths and fears about disability are as handicapping as are the physical limitations that flow from actual impairment." … Though it might surprise Singer and those with limited imaginations, even people with disabilities who encounter obstacles, prejudice, and discrimination, derive satisfaction and pleasure from their lives…
NCD categorically rejects any calculus that assumes to ascribe a measurable, immutable quality of life to another human being – disabled or not. There are simply too many variables to consider in making “quality of life” assumptions. Such conjecture should be left in the classroom alongside brainteasers about moving trains and traveling at the speed of light.
The NDC concludes, “In short, we offer this simple but indispensable advice: “Professor, do your homework.”
And WHO EXACTLY gets to define "quality of life"?
I know a man whose brother was killed on Mengele's orders because he had a slight limp. Over 90% of babies with Down Syndrome are aborted.
"Quality of life" is nothing more than an excuse to create death panels.
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Singer sure seems like a nazi to me.
In the USSR is was because you lived. A nurse there took a late term abortion baby home because the hospital refused to give him any care. They let her because they thought the child would die. But he did not. Under her care he thrived. When he was a few months old they took him away because she was not his legal mother and placed him in an orphanage. Where he weakened and died.
Isn't Peter Singer also the one who put in a book that parents should have the right to abort up to 5 years old? Could being a Christian also be deemed a disability?
Seems as though this guy Singer is living proof that NAZI ethics are not necessarily limited to the citizens of a certain Central European country.
Those “ethics” abound throughout the world, but can be most easily described by the name given to a Socialist Workers Party during the 1930’s.
“zero quality of life” = “Life not Worth Living” - Sieg Hiel!
Definitely do your homework
I recall he had difficulty killing off his “useless eater” Alzheimer inflicted mother when she was ill.
He admitted that practice was much more difficult than preaching.
The problem with Singer isn’t that he failed to “do his homework”. He knows what he’s saying all right.
Those like Professor Singer who advocate the eugenicist position may well have attained that zero quality, but I hope they snap out of it.
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