Michael J. New’s post over at The Corner about what could happen if Roe v. Wade was overturned reminded me of a chilling insight I experienced this past weekend while speaking at/attending a conference on the sanctity of life in health care at San Francisco University. A lawyer was discussing how Roe and subsequent cases actually permitted the death-by-a-thousand cuts strategy that pro lifers have deployed quite successfully for the last few decades. He also described Justice Ginsberg’s belief that the ruling was wrongly decided on privacy, when it should have been predicated on women’s rights. And it hit me: If President Obama replaces one or two of the five conservative/moderate justices, Roe could very well be overturned–from the other direction!

Given that many on the pro-choice side believe that abortion is a fundamental–nay, an absolute–right. And given that many pro choicers believe that abortion should be legal for any reason, at any time during a pregnancy. And given that some among the Planned Parenthood crowd go so far as to assert that a baby born alive after a botched abortion should only be saved at the discretion of the mother and doctor. And given that many in bioethics now claim that a human being only has a right to life if he or she has sufficient mental capacities to be considered a “person”–thereby justifying “post-birth abortion” infanticide: I can easily envision a ruling overturning Roe on the basis that it is insufficiently protective of the right to abortion, that is, a ruling barring any regulation limiting abortion by the states.

After all, the point of Roe was to end the abortion debate. From a certain perspective, the fault in the decision was that it didn’t go far enough to get that job done.  

Bioethics pushed personal autonomy to the forefront of medical decision making, helping forge the legal right to say no to unwanted life-extending care. Today, if a person doesn’t want to be in an ICU or to be otherwise kept alive with medical treatment, the patient or family can say no.  And that’s generally a very good thing. Indeed, without the right to say no, the hospice movement would never have materialized.

But what about patients who want to say yes to such care? Increasingly, patient autonomy is becoming a one-way street. If you want to die, fine. That decision is sacrosanct. If you want to live, well doctors and bioethicists get to make the final decision. This is sometimes called Futile Care Theory or medical futility.

Futile Care Theory is as much about money as it is about benefiting the patient. It is also about honoring the subjective views of doctors and care givers–even at the expense of rejecting a patient’s specific request for efficacious treatment, that is, treatment that would or could achieve the desired medical result of extending the patient’s life.

Now, in Canada (yet again), we see a case in which a patient stated he wanted to be kept alive but the doctors don’t want to comply. From the Toronto Star story:

Joaquim Silva Rodrigues wants to live. It’s what the 73-year-old Catholic man repeatedly told his family he wanted after he was diagnosed with a rare disease called progressive supranuclear palsy two years ago. It’s what his wife and son have demanded on his behalf from his physicians at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre where he lies today, motionless and speechless. On May 14, they placed a note in Rodrigues’s medical chart saying he has “no reasonable hope of recovery or improvement” and that they have decided to withhold mechanical ventilation in the event of a medical emergency requiring life-saving treatment.

That change in status was made unilaterally, without the consent of his family.

The physicians’ point is that Rodrigues has a life not worth living:

Last July, Rodrigues was admitted to Sunnybrook and moved into the ICU in August. Since then, he’s had to be placed on medical ventilation three times, Dr. Andre Amaral testified. There won’t be a fourth, he and his colleagues have decided. “He has no chances of recovery,” Amaral told the panel. “There’s no clear benefit in prolonging life when you cannot tell whether the life that’s being prolonged is actually worth living for. . . . We’re prolonging life for suffering and pain.”

Dr. Keith Rose, Sunnybrook’s chief medical executive, said the number of high-profile physician/patient conflicts at his hospital reflects the sheer volume of critical care cases it receives as one of Canada’s largest trauma centres. “Nobody goes out to try and make families angry, to create confrontation,” he said, adding that the hospital administration supports the decision of its doctors in the Rodrigues case. “The final decision-making, after all steps have been gone through and discussions with the family, then, if it’s in the best interest of the patient, it is the physician’s decision to make.”

But he said that this was a life he considered worth continuing.

I disagree with Rodrigues’ decision. If it were me, I’d reject the ICU. But who cares what I think? It isn’t my life that’s being decided about.

Nor should it be the doctors’ choice, since this kind of decision deals with subjective personal values. In other words, the treatment is to be withheld because it will or could work, not because it won’t.  Thus, the doctors are really saying that the patient’s life–as opposed to the treatment–is futile.

Hard cases make bad law. It will be a very worrying thing–particularly in an age of cost containment and potential conflicts of interest thereby created–if doctors and/or bioethicists are given the final legal say about whose life is worth living. I can’t think of a more certain way to destroy trust in the healthcare system.

I worked my heart out supporting the cause of saving Terri Schiavo’s life. Something very good (for me) came out of that tragedy; an abiding friendship with Terri’s parents and siblings, the Schindler family. In my more than 25 years as a public advocate, I have never met finer or more selfless people–or any more cruelly subjected to the most hateful, vicious, and unwarranted attacks by their detractors. 

Since Terri’s death, the family has worked positively to support people with disabilities at lethal risk of dehydration or other forms of medical discrimination through the Terri Schiavo Life and Hope Network. Most recently, I spoke for the foundation at a fund raising dinner, starring Sarah Palin, whose rousing and loving speech that brought the large crowd to their feet. Now Bobby Schindler, Terri’s brother, has started a blog over at Lifenews.com. For those interested, here’s the link. 

Talk about creating incentives to abort or commit infanticide: A Chinese city could soon fine women who give birth without being married. From The Guardian story:

The central Chinese city of Wuhan has published a draft ordinance that would fine women who have children out of wedlock more than £17,000. The move has raised fears of more of abortions and abandoned infants in a country with an entrenched gender gap. The new regulation is intended to support China’s long-held family planning policies, which allow most couples to have only one child, but local media condemned the proposed ordinance as a value judgment against single mothers.

Malthusianism leads to tyranny. Not coincidentally, China’s one-child policy is seen as a model by some global warming hysterics and other assorted radical environmentalists.

The NYT editorialized today in favor of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, chastising Republicans for blocking USA ratification. That got me to thinking that the Dutch authorities allow doctors to kill babies born with disabilities and I don’t recall a single NYT editorial in defense of those murdered children.

Also, I wondered whether the Dutch have ratified the Convention, which states in part:

States Parties undertake to ensure and promote the full realization of all human rights and fundamental freedoms for all persons with disabilities without discrimination of any kind on the basis of disability. To this end, States Parties undertake:…b. To take all appropriate measures, including legislation, to modify or abolish existing laws, regulations, customs and practices that constitute discrimination against persons with disabilities:

And then there is this simple statement:

Article 10 – Right to life States Parties reaffirm that every human being has the inherent right to life and shall take all necessary measures to ensure its effective enjoyment by persons with disabilities on an equal basis with others.

In answer to my question: Why yes, the Netherlands has ratified the Convention. Hypocrites!

The Netherlands, by permitting doctors to kill disabled babies, is in direct violation of this treaty that the government ratified. No doubt, defenders of Netherlander infanticide would claim that it complies with the part of the treaty requiring states to serve the “best interests” of children with disabilities. But killing is the epitome of prejudice and discrimination, because it denies the chance of the murdered children to have any kind of interests at all.

It is rare when the government has to push Netherlander doctors to be more aggressive with euthanasia. But that is what is happening around the killing of Alzheimer’s patients based on an advance directive. From the British Medical Journal story:

Senior figures in Dutch medicine and politics are set to decide whether advanced euthanasia directives can, in practice, replace verbal requests if patients with dementia are no longer able to express their wishes. Doctors in the Netherlands have expressed “difficulties” with this “grey area,” arguing that some communication is essential if they are to understand properly their patients’ suffering and wishes.

But eminent figures in medical ethics argue that doctors are placing themselves above the 2002 euthanasia law. This law states that doctors can act on an earlier advanced directive once a patient becomes incompetent. A public debate has raged on this subject since the Dutch Medical Association, in its response to the government’s latest research assessing euthanasia policy, proposed adapting the law. It suggested that the legally required second medical opinion must not only see but also communicate with the patient.

Former health minister Els Borst, who piloted the euthanasia law through parliament, has since argued: “A professional body cannot choose its own interpretation of the law.”

But it seems to me the doctors are the ones following the law. What if the patient no longer wants to die? What if the patient isn’t really suffering? The law says killing can be done only when that is required to end suffering. But the government leaders are essentially saying, “What does that matter? The advance directive is what counts!”

The bottom line here is that once a society broadly accepts the poison of euthanasia, the killable categories never stop expanding. Culture of death, Wesley? What culture of death?

Embryology text books will tell you that when fertilization is completed, an embryo is formed. That, is, a new individual organism exists–which remains the same organism until death. 

For scientific purposes, the developmental stages of the embryo are given different names. When it is one-celled, it is a zygote. When it is about 7-10 days along, it is a blastocyst. In human biology, the embryo is called a fetus after three months of gestation, and a new-born infant is called a neonate. But they all refer to the same organism, just at different stages of development.

The same holds true if the embryo comes into being asexually, as in SCNT cloning. But scientists and bioethicists who support the cloning agenda are obfuscating this scientific truth by pretending that cloned embryos aren’t embryos–just as they did about “leftover” IVF embryos that had not been implanted. In this edition, bioethicist Jonathan Moreno claims that a blastocyst isn’t an embryo. From his Huffington Post column:

Despite some confused media reports, the Oregon scientists did not clone a human embryo but a blastocyst that lacks some of the cells needed to implant in a uterus.

Confused, like in Nature? From it’s story on the successful cloning:

Therapeutic cloning, or somatic-cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), begins with the same process used to create Dolly, the famous cloned sheep, in 1996. A donor cell from a body tissue such as skin is fused with an unfertilized egg from which the nucleus has been removed. The egg “reprograms” the DNA in the donor cell to an embryonic state and divides until it has reached the early, blastocyst stage.

Also, let’s quote the Human Embryo Authority in the UK–which supports almost anything having to do with embryonic and cloning research–which accurately notes that a blastocyst is an embryo. From its Website:

A blastocyst is an embryo that has developed for five to six days after fertilisation.

Not only that, but James Thomson, the scientists who first derived human embryonic stem cell lines calls a cloned embryo what it is; an embryo. When an MSNBC reporter in a 2005 interview quoted scientists as suggesting–just as we see happening now–that SCNT cloning couldn’t really be used for “making a baby”, Thomson responded:

See, you are trying to redefine it away…If you create an embryo by nuclear transfer, if you gave it to somebody who didn’t know where it came from, there would be no test you could do on that embryo to say where it came from. It is what it is. By any reasonable definition, at least as some frequency, you are creating an embryo. If you try to redefine it away, you are being disingenuous.

Whether these particular cloned embryos could have been brought successfully to birth is unlikely because in monkeys, cloned embryos and fetuses have miscarried–although one gestated long enough to be seen with a heartbeat on ultrasound. But that is merely a matter of developing the proper technique–just as it was in the difficulties leading up to Dolly’s birth, and it was to creating human cloned embryos and maintaining them to the blastocyst stage.

The fact is, cloning creates an embryo asexually. Those scientists and bioethicists claiming it doesn’t mostly could care less if an embryo is destroyed for research. That is certainly true of Moreno.

Ah, but they think you do, so the terms are redefined to throw mud into the ethical debate. Redefining scientific terms for unscientific reasons–which we also saw ubiquitously in the embryonic stem cell debate–crassly politicizes science, which corrupts its purpose and makes what “the scientists” tell us less trustworthy.

I have advocated here and elsewhere for the forced stillbirth of the Independent Payment Advisory Board, due to go into action later this year. The IPAB is a Medicare cost-cutting board of “experts” legally possessed of the autocratic power to impose its “advice”–even over a presidential veto. It does not currently have health care rationing powers, but as I have noted, powerful voices have called for granting it such death panel status.

I have argued that the Republican Party should engage in “total noncooperation with IPAB.” For example, I urged that Speaker Boehner and Leader McConnell refuse to recommend names for the IPAB board because it doesn’t work to castigate the IPAB and then help find people to run it. 

Such soft power has worked, and now even its most vocal supporters, like the New England Journal of Medicine, have noticed that IPAB seems stuck on the lunching pad. From a NEJM editorial, ”Failure to Launch?”

3 years after the ACA’s enactment, the IPAB still has no members. Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius described “active discussions” about IPAB nominees in February 2012 and said last month that the administration was “consulting Congress regarding “potential members.” But President Obama has not yet nominated anyone for the IPAB, and Republican congressional leaders have refused to provide any recommendations for appointees. Even if Democrats settle on nominees, the controversy surrounding the IPAB will make their Senate confirmations, which are subject to filibuster, extraordinarily difficult. Presidents historically have made appointments when the Senate is in recess, and President Obama conceivably could fill some IPAB slots in this manner. But recess appointments are temporary, lasting only until the end of the next congressional session.

The Obama Administration seems to understand the problem, hence its inaction on the IPAB front. After all, if the president nominates members for the IPAB board, the hearings will become a splendid public platform for educating the public about the wolf that this way comes wearing sheep’s clothes of improving access to health care. Obama never wants that. That was why he gave the health care rationer Donald Berwick a recess appointment, when the Democrats controlled the Senate overwhelmingly and had not even called a committee hearing where Berwick would have testified!

Conveniently, Medicare now says it won’t need IPAB’s services in 2014, allowing Obama to play for time by not appointing members now. But the NEJM editorialist laments that politics are ruining the launch of the technocracy: 

Yet the difficulties in launching the IPAB point to a more fundamental problem. The board’s appeal lies largely in its aspiration to remove politics from Medicare–to create a policymaking process that is informed by experts and insulated from electoral pressures, interest-group demands, financial considerations, and partisan divisions. But given Congress’s extreme partisan and ideological polarization, the ongoing fight over the ACA, the legacy of mythic “death panels,” and recriminations over Medicare reform, the IPAB’s rough start should not be surprising. This is not the sort of political environment in which an independent board charged with making controversial decisions about one of America’s most popular social programs is likely to thrive. These dynamics are unlikely to recede soon, which means that the IPAB is stuck in purgatory, neither operational nor canceled–an institution designed to be above politics that cannot escape the political binds holding it back.

Purgatory will have to do until the thing can, like the Wicked Witch of the East, be made not merely dead, but really most sincerely dead.  

The ACLU can be counted on to advocate on behalf of culture of death issues. Now, it is suing to overturn Arizona’s ban on sex and race-based abortion. From the AP story:

Civil rights groups on Wednesday sued Arizona to block a 2011 law banning abortions based on the race or sex of the child that makes it a felony to knowingly provide a sex- or race-based abortion. Lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona said the law unconstitutionally singles out Asian and black women based on stereotypes and the sponsors’ beliefs that Asian and black women may choose an abortion because of race or the baby’s sex.

What? The law bans abortion based on sex and race. It doesn’t ban abortions by black or Asian women. Just because there was legislative history that some communities might be more likely to terminate a pregnancy based on sex, doesn’t mean the law is invidiously aimed at those communities. 

And here I thought the ACLU opposed racism and sexism. 

Human subject research is rife with potential ethical peril. That is why, beginning with the Nuremberg Code–which led to the USA’s Common Rule and international legal agreements, such as the Helsinki Accords–great efforts are made to ensure that human experimentation protocols protect participants’ safety, most particularly that of the most vulnerable, such as children.

With so much going on, self-monitoring is often the rule. And with protocols complicated and often arcane, it can be very difficult for to keep an eye on what is going on. That is why I so admire the the Alliance for Human Research Protection-an organization that endeavors to cast the public’s eye on dubious or unethical research practices.

The AHRP is currently campaigning to protect healthy children from being used as research subjects in an anthrax vaccine study–which could expose them to potential health risks. Despite the fact that the experiments are non-therapeutic as to the children who would participate, as I reported here at HE in March, President Obama’s bioethics council okayed the experiments moving forward, at least in theory. 

Now, the AHRP has issued a public letter to Obama urging him to shut the process down. From the letter:

Inasmuch as there is no evidence that American children are at risk of a bioterrorist attack, such medical experiments are explicitly prohibited by Federal statutes. Accordingly, children may not be exposed to more than a “minor increase over minimal risk” in research unless: “The intervention or procedure is likely to yield generalizable knowledge about the subjects’ disorder or condition which is of vital importance for the understanding or amelioration of the subjects’ disorder or condition.” [45 CFR46.406]

Well, a bioterrorist attack with anthrax is certainly a possibility, given the times in which we live. But, it seems to me that a vaccine’s experiment on children that could harm them is not of “vital importance” for understanding or ameliorating a risk that is mostly theoretical, and if it occurs, very likely to be a localized threat. 

Moreover, according to the AHRP, adult studies have apparently not demonstrated efficacy:

The planned anthrax vaccine experiment was initiated on the basis of a simulated exercise–called “Dark Zephyr”–not on the basis of real evidence of risk. After decades of testing, the effectiveness of the anthrax vaccine (BioThrax) following an attack has never been proven, and its safety problems are of considerable concern. Indeed, the FDA-approved label states: “The safety and efficacy of BioThrax in a post-exposure setting have not been established.”

Children exposed to this controversial vaccine will be put at significant risk of harm–not to mention severe pain–with no benefit for them. Furthermore, given the vaccine’s failure, after decades of testing in adults, to demonstrate its effectiveness, a pediatric trial is unlikely to succeed. Therefore, the trial will have no clinical or scientific value, much less be “of vital importance.”

I can’t imagine any parent allowing their child to be exposed to potential illness in an anthrax study, which even Obama’s commission admitted carries more than “minimal risk.”

It is so hard to follow these things. Thanks to the AHRP for keeping a sharp eye. 

Cost cutting! Cost cutting! Cost cutting! That’s the new mantra under Obamacare. As a consequence, perhaps, we are beginning to see new medical advice seeking to dissuade us from some cancer screening tests due to “false positives.” And now, we see a study telling us that involved and engaged patients cost the system more. From the Health Day story:

Although doctors and patients have long been urged to share decision-making, new research finds that patients who are involved in their care spend more time in the hospital and increase the cost of their hospital stay. Researchers at the University of Chicago Medical Center found that patients who share in decision-making raise the cost of their admission by an average of $865.“The result that everyone would have liked — that patients who are more engaged in their care do better and cost less — is not what we found in this setting,” the study’s author, Dr. David Meltzer, associate professor of medicine, economics and public policy at the University of Chicago, said in a university news release. “Patients who want to be more involved do not have lower costs. Patients, as consumers, may value elements of care that the health care system might not.”

The researchers said there are roughly 35 million hospitalizations each year in the United States. They calculated that if 30 percent of those patients shared in decision-making on their care instead of allowing their doctor to call the shots, it would result in $8.7 billion in additional costs every year.

After so much emphasis over decades on patient decision-making–often focusing on the right to say no–I worry that studies such as this will be used by Obamacare cost/benefit bureaucrats as an excuse to prevent patients from deciding to say yes. Or to put it another way, don’t let the bean counters ever tell you to mind your own business when it comes to your own medical decisions.  

Your doctor’s job when she or he is treating you, is you–not other patients. Otherwise, the doctor will become hopelessly entwined in serious conflicts of interest. 

A newborn baby was flushed down a toilet in China, but luckily saved. From the Telegraph story:

The abandoned two-day-old child was discovered on Saturday afternoon in Jinhua, a city in the eastern province of Zhejiang, after the residents of a tower block reported hearing crying.Unable to pull the baby free, fire fighters were forced to saw off a four-inch wide piece of piping from the floor below and then take the baby to hospital while still inside the pipe.

The five pound baby boy was finally extracted from the pipe after nearly an hour, according to a local news website. Chinese television showed white-gloved hospital staff using a pair of red pliers and a yellow saw to pull open the pipe. Inside was a tiny baby, filthy and terrified but alive.

This ugliness is probably a consequence of China’s tyrannous one-child policy:

Cases of abandoned babies are common in China with young mothers and strict family planning rules often blamed for the phenomenon. But Saturday’s highly unusual case provoked a furious response on Chinese social media sites with hundreds of thousands of comments posted this week. The parents who did this have hearts even filthier than that sewage pipe,” wrote one user of the Twitter-like Weibo. Other abandoned babies are not so lucky. On May 22 another child was found in a dustbin in Hebei province, wrapped in a pink cloth and badly bruised.

It strikes me that the symbolism of this story captures the zeitgeist of the times. There is a war against the sanctity of life of babies out there. Think late term abortion justified by Planned Parenthood, to the point that a Florida official even asserted that saving a baby that survived a botched abortion should be up to the mother and doctor. Think Gosnell. Think late-term abortionists given a standing O at the Sundance Film Festival. Think “after-birth abortion” advocacy and the denial of the personhood of infants by the ilk of Princeton’s Peter Singer. Thank advocacy for a right to a dead fetus. Think radical environmentalists’ extreme Malthusianism, with some warming hysterics calling for universal China-type population policies to “save the planet.”

Do most people believe that fetuses and babies are the moral equivalent of solid waste? Of course not. But too many sure talk as if they do.

China has an evil one-child policy–often extolled by the Malthusians among radical environmentalists and global warming hysterics as a needed authoritarian action to “save the planet.” Now, we see the tyranny of Myanmar imposing a two-child limit–but only against the nation’s Muslims. From the NYT story:

The local authorities in the western state of Rakhine in Myanmar have imposed a two-child limit for Muslim Rohingya families, a policy that does not apply to Buddhists in the area and comes amid accusations of ethnic cleansing during earlier sectarian violence. Officials said Saturday that the new measure would be applied to two Rakhine townships that border Bangladesh and that have the highest Muslim populations in the state.

The unusual order makes Myanmar perhaps the only country in the world to impose such a restriction on a religious group, and it is likely to fuel further criticism that Muslims are being discriminated against in the Buddhist-majority country.

Ever since the Population Bomb warned incorrectly that we are doomed due to over-breeding, Deep Ecologists and their anti-human ilk and progeny have yearned for forced population control. The “villain”–perhaps really the hero of Dan Brown’s new novel, Inferno–seeks to spread a virus that will make 1/3 of the world involuntarily infertile, and I would bet that many on the Left would applaud if such a thing could actually be done. But this is the first case I have heard of forced population control as a form of religious persecution. Not good. Not good at all. 

Society’s acceptance of assisted suicide’s ideology eventually will lead, I predict, to a right to help being made dead for any adult with more than a transitory desire to die–and for any reason. After all, assisted suicide ideology couples radical personal autonomy and total body ownership with a view that killing is an acceptable answer to suffering. Moreover,”suffering” is seen as an entirely subjective concept, meaning it is whatever the sufferer says it is. No judgment allowed.

That being so, how can a “right to be made dead” be limited to the terminally ill, the catastrophically disabled, or indeed, even those experiencing measurable physical symptoms? It can’t. Thus, in Belgium, we have seen a joint euthanasia of an elderly couple who didn’t want to be separated. Ditto, Switzerland. In the Netherlands, a growing number of people with mental illnesses and the aged “tired of life” are being voluntarily killed or assisted in suicide by doctors. Indeed, Netherlander doctors are allowed by an ethics opinion from the Dutch Medical Association (KNMG) to teach patients, who are not legally qualified for euthanasia, how to do the deed themselves!

In Switzerland, a healthy woman who didn’t want to experience the decline of aging but was actually denied assisted suicide, has sued, claiming a doctor should be forced to prescribe for her. The court didn’t do that, but it has ordered the country to create more clarity in its laws about who has the legal right to help being made dead. From the Washington Post story:

The vagueness of Swiss laws “concerning a particularly important aspect of her life was likely to have caused Ms. Gross a considerable degree of anguish,” the court found. And while Swiss laws allow for the possibility of obtaining a lethal dose of a drug on medical prescription, it added, those laws “did not provide sufficient guidelines ensuring clarity as to the extent of this right.”

Note: The absence of clear guidelines was seen as a cause of anguish. That point could easily be read to mean, not having access to suicide itself is an unacceptable cause of suffering–particularly as many non terminally ill people commit assisted suicide at the Swiss clinics already.

If history is any guide, the legal “clarity” will move Switzerland toward even greater ease in accessing assisted suicide than already exists–perhaps even for the unquestionably healthy:

The court said it recognized the issue is a difficult one, but that more specific Swiss laws would help doctors make better informed decisions free of fear of litigation or bad publicity. The Swiss government said in 2010 that sodium pentobarbital could be used in exceptional cases for severe psychological illness.

A year later, the Swiss government dropped plans to impose stricter rules regarding “passive assisted suicide.” The government said the current rules strike a balance between protecting vulnerable individuals and safeguarding their right to self-determination, and new laws could infringe on people’s personal freedoms.

Note where the focus lies–on the first pillar of assisted suicide advocacy. Thus, even though the court didn’t say that Switzerland had to liberalize the law, that is what I predict law makers will do, rather than impose any meaningful restrictions. More liberality equals less protection, equals another big step toward death-on-demand. But that’s what happens in a culture of death. 

India has been long been an international center of biological colonialism, including a shameful industry in surrogate motherhood, in which desperate destitute women sell their gestational capacities–occasionally at the cost of their lives. Now, a bill (SB 162) has overwhelmingly passed the Louisiana Legislature that will bring biological colonialism to the Pelican State by establishing an industry in surrogate motherhood. Hmm. Perhaps they should change the state’s moniker to the Stork State. 

Of course, the term “surrogate mother” has long gone out of fashion in the powerful infertility industry. Rather, women who give birth to others’ children are known by the dehumanizing terms of “gestational carrier” or “gestational surrogate,” which makes me think “brood mare” every time I see it.

In any event, “genetic surrogacy” would remain outlawed–that is a mother agreeing to carry her own child for money to be given to others. But “gestational surrogacy,” in which a woman is impregnated with the biological embryo of others, would become a legal Louisiana industry. And guess which women would (mostly) be desperate enough to carry babies for others, to be compensated for things like living expenses and costs of travel? It sure won’t be the professional classes, the people most likely to rent the wombs!

Kathleen Parker has a good column raising some pertinent objections. From, “Surrogacy Exposed:”

There is a dark underbelly to the surrogacy industry–and it is a business–including a burgeoning industry that preys on vulnerable women, commodifying them as “ovens”–a term Smith himself used. Never mind repercussions for the children themselves, who may have as many as five “parents”–from the egg and sperm donors, to the woman who carries them to the couple or single parent who adopts them…

The simplicity of the human desire for children notwithstanding, there’s nothing simple about the surrogacy business–and we haven’t scraped the surface of the metaphysical, spiritual, emotional and psychological issues with which a brief flirtation evokes mind-twisting complexities. Physical concerns, meanwhile, are plentiful.

Indeed. It used to that women were commodified primarily for their sexual functions and features. Today, their reproductive parts and biological functions are being turned into natural resources to be exploited by those who can pay the tab. 

Parker’s conclusion nails it:

While no one wishes to cause pain to people who, for whatever reason, can’t have a child on their own, there are more compelling principles and consequences in play. Human babies are not things; their mothers are not ovens. But bartering and selling babies-to-order sure make them seem that way. By turning the miracle of life into a profit-driven, state-regulated industry, the stork begins to resemble a vulture.

Think of all the children out there just begging for adoption. Governor Jindal. Veto!

The New York Times ran a powerful op/ed this week, written by a Chinese novelist, detailing the brutality of the the country’s one-child policy. From the piece by Ma Jian:

Village family-planning officers vigilantly chart the menstrual cycle and pelvic-exam results of every woman of childbearing age in their area. If a woman gets pregnant without permission and is unable to pay the often exorbitant fine for violating the policy, she risks being subjected to a forced abortion. According to Chinese Health Ministry data released in March, 336 million abortions and 222 million sterilizations have been carried out since 1971. (Though the one-child policy was introduced in 1979, other, less-stringent family planning policies were in place before it.)

These figures are easy to quote, but they fail to convey the magnitude of the horror faced by rural Chinese women. During a long journey through the hinterlands of southwest China in 2009, I was able to find some of the faces behind these numbers. On ramshackle barges moored on the remote waterways of Hubei and Guangxi, I met hundreds of “family-planning fugitives”– couples who’d fled their villages to give birth to an unauthorized second or third child in neighboring provinces. Almost every one of the pregnant women I spoke to had suffered a mandatory abortion. One woman told me how, when she was eight months pregnant with an illegal second child and was unable to pay the 20,000 yuan fine (about $3,200), family planning officers dragged her to the local clinic, bound her to a surgical table and injected a lethal drug into her abdomen…

It is not surprising that China has the highest rate of female suicide in the world. The one-child policy has reduced women to numbers, objects, a means of production; it has denied them control of their bodies and the basic human right to determine freely and responsibly the number and spacing of their children. Baby girls are also victims of the policy. Under family pressure to ensure that their only child is a son, women often choose to abort baby girls or discard them at birth, practices that have skewed China’s sex ratio to 118 boys for every 100 girls.

This should make China a pariah. But there’s money to be made and cheap labor aplenty.

We all participate whenever we buy goods made in China–which one is virtually forced to do these days. I’m not sure what we an do other than weave our own clothes and give up cell phones. And even then, we all buy things we don’t need because we want them. Guilty as charged!  But if I can buy something not made in China, I always do so even if it means a higher price. 

But that doesn’t excuse the Malthusian radical environmentalists and global warming hysterics who have urged that the West adopt such policies to “save the planet.” That is anti-human.

The mainstream media–under the influence of spin from “the scientists”–has been playing a game of hide-the-ball about the recent first human cloning success. For example, the LA Times threw a lot of dirt in the air by calling the success merely an “incremental step” toward human cloning. No. It. Was. Human Cloning. Many stories also reported falsely that eggs were turned directly into embryonic stem cells–omitting the ethically controversial steps in which cloned embryos were created and then destroyed for the cells. Ignorance or bias? Both, says I.

Ah, but the science journals have told a different story, meaning that at least to some degree, the scientists have said one thing to each other–honestly describing what happened–and another to the rest of us. We see the honesty-to-other-scientists approach again in a story discussing questions that have arisen regarding the paper itself. From the Nature News story:

A blockbuster paper that reported the creation of human stem cell lines via cloning has come under fire. An anonymous online commenter found four problems in the paper, which was published online 15 May in the journal Cell.

STOP! Notice the words, “via cloning.” Enough of the obfuscation scientists and media! But back to the trouble in Paradise:

Many scientists were shocked that Cell accepted the paper in just three days, especially given the scientific and ethical controversies surrounding the field of cloning. The last group that claimed to have created human embryonic stem cell lines from cloning–led by Woo Suk Hwang, then a professor at Seoul National University–produced two papers, in 2004 and 2005, which both turned out to be full of fabricated data that papered over the fact that the group had never produced cloned cell lines. The first doubts to emerge came in the same form: duplicated and manipulated images.

“Whatever the explanation is, it’s amazing that there is another issue with a paper in SCNT. The four-day review process was obviously inadequate,” says Arnold Kriegstein, director of the stem cell program at the University of California, San Francisco. “It’s a degree of sloppiness that you wouldn’t expect in a paper that was going to have this high profile. One worries if there is more than meets the eye and whether there are other issues with the work that are not as apparent.”

They rushed because–despite the soothing assurances to us yahoos–it was human cloning and human cloning is a very big deal. Indeed, as I have written elsewhere, it is an ethical earthquake.

I don’t expect this to be a fraud. Human cloning is here. We have to deal with it. 

I keep saying that if you want to see what the USA will look like in ten years under Obamacare, just look at the mess that calls itself the National Health Service in the UK. It isn’t that the NHS is socialized medicine per se–although that is part of it. More importantly in my view, the NHS has a sclerotic and bureaucratic top-down approach to healthcare that deprofessionalizes medicine by dictating treatment protocols from on high.

Now, a columnist in the left wing Guardian notes that disabled people face deadly discrimination in NHS hospitals. From, “The NHS is Killing Disabled People:”

Each week 24 disabled people are killed by such prejudiced presumptions; indeed, there was a case at my local hospital recently. These shocking figures are based on a government-commissioned inquiry into one region of the country, which found people with disabilities 37% more likely to be killed by incompetence or inadequate care � and their lives end on average 16 years earlier than they should. The more serious the disabilities, the higher the risk.

Forgive me if I fail to join the national worship of the NHS. Mencap has been campaigning to prevent these deaths, logging at least 100 cases over the past six years. The charity blames poor communication with parents and carers as the main cause � but it has concluded that the only explanation for so many preventable deaths is prejudice. Doctors and nurses reflect views prevalent across society that people with profound disabilities are second-class citizens, their lives not worth saving. Imagine the furore if any other minority group was dying in such numbers.

Disabled people always face hurdles in being treated as fully equal. It is a consequence of rejecting human exceptionalism.

But medical discrimination involves more than a discriminatory cultural default setting. The NHS explicitly controls costs through a ”quality of life” rationing system, dictated by NICE–the misnamed National Institute of Clinical and Health Excellence. With quality of life judgmentalism in the bone marrow of the system, we can hardly be surprised that those deemed to have a lower quality of life–and who happen to be more expensive to care for–end up on the short end of the stethoscope.

Obamacare will institute the same kind of quality of life rationing, over time, here in the USA. Indeed, many among the medical intelligentsia and other architects of Obamacare are all for it as a way of controlling costs–including the New England Journal of Medicine. 

One suicide begets another, a study in Canada has demonstrated. From the Ottawa Citizen story:

That suicide is contagious is a widely held–and controversial–theory. A groundbreaking new study co-authored by a University of Ottawa researchers has found that teens who know of a schoolmate who died of suicide are far more likely to think about or attempt suicide than those with no “exposure.” ”It’s solid evidence that supports a theory that has been around for a long time–that suicide contagion is real,” says Dr. Ian Colman, Canada Research Chair in Mental Health Epidemiology at the University of Ottawa, who wrote the paper with Sonja Swanson of the Harvard School of Public Health. “I hope schools and school boards take it seriously.”

Me too, but not just schools–although the suicides by teenagers are particularly tragic.

If suicide is “contagious” than so too assisted suicide–which is actively promoted far and wide in the media as “taking control” or “death with dignity.” Indeed, the infectious effect could even be more penetrating throughout general society: When a state or country legalizes assisted suicide/euthanasia, the culture is explicitly stating that some self-killings are A-OK. 

If my suspicions are correct, the recent spike in suicides–especially bad in Oregon–may at least be indirectly fueled by assisted suicide advocacy–which is actually suicide promotion. In this sense, why are we surprised when an increasingly a pro-suicide culture has a general problem with suicide.  At the very least, it does nothing to abate or reduce the problem.  

I just read an article that is a clear call for Germany to get in on the human cloning game. And as so often happens in this issue, it is filled with scientific inaccuracies–whether by intent or ignorance, I don’t know.

First, the article in Deutche Welle, claims that the recent human cloning did not involved embryos–when we all know that SCNT cloning MAKES EMBRYOS! From the DW story:

Scientists, for the first time, have cloned embryonic stem cells using reprogrammed adult skin cells, without using human embryos…The process used by Mitalipov is an important step in research because it does not require killing a human embryo–that is, a potential human being–to create transformative stem cells.

Aaaugh! Also, an embryo is a human being, albeit at its most nascent stage. 

The Cell paper announcing the cloning breakthrough told a different story:

Activation of embryonic genes and transcription from the transplanted somatic cell nucleus are required for development of SCNT embryos beyond the eight-cell stage…Therefore, these results are consistent with the premise that our modified SCNT protocol supports reprogramming of human somatic cells to the embryonic state.

So, in a science journal, it’s an embryo, but in the popular media, it’s not?  That’s mendacious. 

Human cloning can’t be done legally in Germany:

In Germany, this procedure is illegal. Human egg cells cannot be donated for any purpose. “The technique needed to get egg cells is a significant health hazard for women with substantial side effects,” says Bert Heinrichs, director of science at the German Reference Center for Ethics in the Life Sciences (DRZE)…Cloning is banned in Germany because theoretically a fertilized egg cell–the beginning of an embryo–could develop into a human being. Ethically, this is the classic moral conflict between the search for cures and treatments for human ailments and the right to life, explains DRZE director Dieter Sturma.

Hopefully, this was a bad translation. Cloned embryos are not fertilized. They are created asexually through the SCNT process–as Dolly was. Also, note the implication that CURES! are just around the corner.

The article warns that Germany better on the human cloning bandwagon!

But one thing is certain: research in the coming years will not be happening in Germany due to the country’s Embryo Protection Act. However, if cloning science progresses faster than expected in laboratories around the world, a new round of ethical problems could emerge. “Of course, there will be stem cell tourism. When methods are not offered in Germany, people, who are desperate, will look elsewhere,” warned Sturma.

The great cloning debate is about to begin. Just as with the embryonic stem cell debate, there will be hype and obfuscation by the pro-cloning side. That’s disrespectful of democratic processes.

This is not a science debate, it is an ethics debate. Good ethical analysis requires accurate facts. That seems to be precisely what many among “the scientists” intend to deny the public.