“Ecocide” equates the slaughter at Auschwitz/Berkenau with the development of the Alberta tar sands. I’m serious. ” Ecocide–killing the earth–is a proposed new “international crime against peace” that activists consider an equivalent horror to such true evils as genocide and ethnic cleansing. 

Ecocide would literally criminalize large-scale resource development and treat wealth creators from the earth as we now do war criminals. As I wrote elsewhere:

The This Is Ecocide website states:

Ecocide is the extensive destruction, damage to or loss of ecosystem(s) of a given territory, whether by human agency or other causes, to such an extent that peaceful enjoyment by the inhabitants of that territory has been severely diminished.

Note that “peaceful enjoyment by the inhabitants” is a very broad term, intended to include everything from grass, fish, and insects to mice, snakes, and people. And diminishment of “peaceful enjoyment” would not require actual pollution, but could mean a declining supply of forage or a loss of foliage caused by almost any use of the land, perhaps even simple urban growth. 

Not only that, but the crime of ecocide would be so encompassing that any company involved in large scale resource development would almost certainly commit it. Indeed, fictional CEOs of Alberta Tar Sand extraction companies have already been found guilty in a mock trial held at the English Supreme Court.

Ecocide treats the lives of humans and flora and fauna as morally equal. From the proposed statute: 

3. Crime against humanity- A person, company, organisation, partnership, or any other legal entity who causes ecocide under section 1 of this Act and has breached a human right to life is also guilty of a crime against humanity.

4. Crime against nature- A person, company, organisation, partnership, or any other legal entity who causes ecocide under section 1 of this Act and has breached a non-human right to life is guilty of a crime against nature…

6. Crime of Ecocide- The right to life is a universal right and where a person, company, organisation, partnership, or any other legal entity causes extensive damage to, destruction of or loss of human and or non-human life of the inhabitants of a territory under sections 1 – 5 of this Act is guilty of the crime of Ecocide.

Kill field mice, go to prison in the Hague.

Ecocide is anti human because (among other reasons) it rejects human exceptionalism, and if it were ever enacted, it would plunge the world into economic collapse. 

Now, a petition drive is about to commence seeking to have the European Parliament pass an anti-ecocide law. From the press release:

The launch of the European Citizens’ Initiative “End Ecocide in Europe” will take place in the European Parliament in Brussels on 22 January 2013.  This initiative, led by a committee of 11 citizens from nine European countries, aims at ending ecocide, which is the extensive damage to, destruction of, or loss of ecosystems.  The event marks the beginning of a significant process; in 1 year the initiative must collect 1 million signatures after which Ecocide may be made a crime in the European Union.

Don’t think that in a world in which a river has been made a “person” in New Zealand and “nature” has been given the equivalent of human rights in two countries and some 30 American cities, that activists won’t find one million clueless and/or nihilistic Europeans to sign their petition. Some people really do want us to return to the caves.

Ecocide won’t become law in the near term, but unless we combat it now in its embryonic stage, the ecocide movement has the potential to cause real human harm. 

Assisted suicide is against Canadian federal law, a statute that applies throughout the country. But health care law is governed by the provinces (as I understand it).  Hence, Quebec will try and redefine some suicides into a medical treatment as a means of circumventing federal law. From the CBC story:

The Quebec government says it will proceed with so-called “dying with dignity” legislation aimed at allowing doctors to help some terminally ill patients end their lives. A provincial panel of legal experts studying medically assisted end-of-life procedures released its recommendations Tuesday, suggesting Quebec could bypass the Canadian Criminal Code — which prohibits assisted suicide — and allow doctors to help some people who wish to die at a time of their own choosing. The panel concludes that when a terminally ill patient is receiving palliative treatment and can demonstrate with lucidity the desire to end his or her life, helping that patient carry out that wish should be considered part of the continuum of care.

Suicide isn’t “care,” it is killing, which palliative care isn’t about in any way, manner, shape, or form. Passing a law pretending that it is could lead to confusion about hospice, the difference between refusing medical treatment, euthanasia, and the true meaning of pain control. Or, to put it another way, one can call a stink bug a butterfly, but it is still a stinkbug. 

In just ten years, Belgium has trumped the culture of death in the Netherlands that took some thirty years to poisonously flower. For example, there has been a joint euthanasia of an elderly couple, which was celebrated by a Belgian bioethicist in a news report. Belgian doctors also brag about coupling voluntary euthanasia with consensual organ harvesting–particularly targeted at the disable who want to die because they have “good organs.” And now, twins have been killed in a joint euthanasia. From the Telegraph story:

Identical twins were killed by Belgian doctors last month in a unique mercy killing under Belgium’s euthanasia laws. The two men, 45, from the Antwerp region were both born deaf and sought euthanasia after finding that they would also soon go blind. The pair told doctors that they were unable to bear the thought of not being able to see each other again. The twin brothers had spent their entire lives together, sharing a flat and both working as cobblers. Doctors at Brussels University Hospital in Jette “euthanized” the two men by lethal injection on 14 December last year.

In a morally sane society, the death doctors would lose their licenses and be tried for homicide. But Belgium no longer fits that description.

But, I must say, after fighting against this issue for twenty years, I am not surprised. This is the simple logic of euthanasia consciousness. Once killing is seen as an answer to human suffering, the meaning of the term becomes very elastic and the killable caste, like the universe, never stops expanding.  

Over at First Things, the First Thoughts blog has re-published the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus’s last speech (2008) to the National Right to Life Committee. In it, he asks when his audience first noticed the culture of death, and recounts his own awakening. From, “We Shall Not Weary, We Shall Not Rest:”

The culture of death is an idea before it is a deed. I expect many of us here, perhaps most of us here, can remember when we were first encountered by the idea. For me, it was in the 1960s when I was pastor of a very poor, very black, inner city parish in Brooklyn, New York. I had read that week an article by Ashley Montagu of Princeton University on what he called “A Life Worth Living.” He listed the qualifications for a life worth living: good health, a stable family, economic security, educational opportunity, the prospect of a satisfying career to realize the fullness of one’s potential. These were among the measures of what was called “a life worth living.”…

Neuhaus looks out at his congregation and sees the very types of people who Montagu denigrated as having lives not worth living:

In that moment, I knew that I had been recruited to the cause of the culture of life. To be recruited to the cause of the culture of life is to be recruited for the duration; and there is no end in sight, except to the eyes of faith.

I had a similar epiphany when I learned that my friend Frances had been persuaded to kill herself by reading Hemlock Society literature.  From the Introduction to my book Forced Exit: Euthanasia, Assisted Suicide, and the New Duty to Die:

As I read the material, my jaw literally dropped.  I could not believe my eyes.  The documents seemed scurrilous to me—nothing less than pro-suicide propaganda extolling self-destruction as a morally correct and an empowering experience.  Most of the newsletters had stories in them—allegedly letters from satisfied readers—of warm and successful suicides, and/or advocacy pieces by euthanasia proponents.  The articles had an almost religious tone to them that made me feel as if I were reading tracts from some bizarre death cult.

The January 1988 issue of the Hemlock Quarterly caught my eye because it was especially worn from frequent reading.[i] One of the stories inside, entitled “A Peaceful Passing,” signed by “A New Member in California” (supposedly a grief counselor), told in glowing terms of the suicide of Sam, allegedly a terminal cancer patient.  Frances had underscored these words from the story:

Believe it or not, we laughed and giggled and [Sam] seemed to relish the experience.  I think for Sam it was finally taking control again after ten years of being at the mercy of a disease and medical protocols demanded by that disease.

Suicide promoted as uplifting, enjoyable fun sickened me.

 Frances’s suicide–and how she was seduced toward yielding to her self-destructive urges–changed the arc of my life.  Completely. That’s the moment I was recruited. And as Fr. Neuhaus said, I am in it for the duration.

The coming fight over human cloning will make the stem cell debate seem like a day at Disneyland. And it’s coming. Even as you read these words, researchers around the world are striving to lay the claim as the First Human Cloner: One small step for asexual reproduction, one giant leap for Brave New World.

When–not if–that happens, a public brouhaha will begin to ban or regulate the technology. I offer some thoughts about all this in my biweekly over at First Things. From, “The Coming Public Conflict Over Human Cloning:”

Proponents of human cloning believe it offers tremendous scientific potential and the opportunity to make fortunes. But opponents like myself—both on the political left and right—strongly believe that human cloning is intrinsically immoral, meaning that no potential utilitarian benefit justifies developing the technology.

I get into a few of the many reasons why opponents believe as we do, and then propose some ideas for keeping the beast in the cage:

If we agree that human cloning is unethical, how do we stop it, and what have we learned from recent public policy debates over biotechnology? We could follow the urging of the United Nations General Assembly and support an international treaty outlawing all human cloning as “incompatible with human dignity and the protection of human life.” Absent an international ban, the federal and state governments could take action.

But as political battles over ESCR demonstrated, actions seen as stifling research are risky, and too often allow proponents of the research to reduce essential issues and nuanced discussion to a predictable trope of “science” under attack from religion. Starving cloning on the vine could prove easier. The technology will cost a lot of money to perfect. Thus, passing national and state laws prohibiting all public funding of human cloning research would put a severe crimp on developing the technology and possibly dissuade the most talented scientists from pursuing the field…

Finally, to prevent the public from being seduced by the same siren-song hype about “cures” we saw a decade ago with ESCR, we need to assure people that scientists can obtain many of the benefits they want most from biotechnology through alternative, ethical means. In this regard, induced pluripotent stem cells have already become valuable research tools in studying disease models and drug testing—and in the precise ways that proponents once claimed would require cloning to accomplish.

I am convinced that human cloning represents a piercing threat to human exceptionalism and the dignity of the individual. We should heed Huxley’s prophetic warnings and act now to cage the beast before it is too late.

Ha! Two anonymous bloggers who operate something called The Encyclopedia of American Loons, have listed me as a member of their aviary.  From the Wesley J. Smith entry:

Diagnosis: More careful, and less obviously insane than many of his fellow [Discovery Institute] Fellows, Smith is nevertheless driven by dogma in selecting which evidence he chooses to endorse. He enjoys a rather high profile, and must be considered dangerous.

Gosh, I hope so.

I am apparently a loon because the authors disagree with me about matters ranging from embryonic stem cell research to Terri Schiavo. But the Encyclopedia doesn’t state exactly where I am mistaken, why my views make me certifiable, or what “dogma” drives me. They just lazily link to articles that have been critical of my work.

Pretty funny. But I do wish they would use a picture of me that isn’t ten years old. I’ve shaved fellows!

Anti-humanists–ranging from deep ecology misanthropes, to some global warming alarmists, The Population Bomb true believers, and “nature rights” advocates, among others–claim repeatedly that teeming humanity will soon overwhelm all other life on the planet, requiring immediate steps to dramatically depopulate.  In this view, we are a scourge, the AIDS afflicting Gaia. Indeed, the plot of a recent A-List Hollywood movie–The Day the Earth Stood Still–had Keanu Reeves as the alien Klaatu, travel here to commit total genocide to “save the earth.”

But now, according to an article in Slate–no right wing Big Oil tool–claims that not only is overpopulation alarmism overblown, but we need to start having more children. 

What’s up? Apparently it took longer to get from 6 billion people to 7 billion than it did for our population to grow from 5 billion to 6 billion, meaning the rate of growth is slowing. That means, some experts now say, that we probably won’t smother all other life on earth after all, much less starve ourselves into extinction. From, “About That Overpopulation Problem,” by Jeff Wise:

In other words, the rate of global population growth has slowed. And it’s expected to keep slowing. Indeed, according to experts’ best estimates, the total population of Earth will stop growing within the lifespan of people alive today. And then it will fall.

Fall?  How is that possible?  

Scientists who study population dynamics point to a phenomenon called ‘demographic transition.’ “For hundreds of thousands of years,” explains Warren Sanderson, a professor of economics at Stony Brook University, “in order for humanity to survive things like epidemics and wars and famine, birthrates had to be very high.” Eventually, thanks to technology, death rates started to fall in Europe and in North America, and the population size soared. In time, though, birthrates fell as well, and the population leveled out. The same pattern has repeated in countries around the world. Demographic transition, Sanderson says, “is a shift between two very different long-run states: from high death rates and high birthrates to low death rates and low birthrates.” Not only is the pattern well-documented, it’s well under way: Already, more than half the world’s population is reproducing at below the replacement rate.

That’s good news, right? Wrong! 

And in the long term—on the order of centuries—we could be looking at the literal extinction of humanity.

That might sound like an outrageous claim, but it comes down to simple math. According to a 2008 IIASA report, if the world stabilizes at a total fertility rate of 1.5—where Europe is today—then by 2200 the global population will fall to half of what it is today. By 2300, it’ll barely scratch 1 billion. (The authors of the report tell me that in the years since the initial publication, some details have changed—Europe’s population is falling faster than was previously anticipated, while Africa’s birthrate is declining more slowly—but the overall outlook is the same.) Extend the trend line, and within a few dozen generations you’re talking about a global population small enough to fit in a nursing home.

Apparently no matter what happens, we are doomed. And they make fun of the “Armageddon is coming!” crowd. At least the Voluntary Human Extinction groupies will be happy. Good grief.

Recent experiments with mice indicate that induced pluripotent stem cells–that is embryonic-like stem cells made from skin–are as effective as their unethically derived cousins. From the Nature News report:

A paper published in Nature today could dispel a cloud over the hopes of turning a patient’s own cells into perfectly matched replacement tissues…Hochedlinger believes that iPS cells are just as promising for cell transplantation as ES cells, although many issues stand between the lab and the clinic. The differences between the two kinds of stem cell are minor compared with the differences in how individual cell lines grow and differentiate in culture, he says. “Based on what we know at this time from mice,” he says, “iPS cells are as good as ES cells, and should be as safe.”

Good ethics and good science have the cultural healing power to produce a common way forward.  Onward. 

India and the world were shocked and appalled by the vicious gang rape and subsequent death of an Indian medical student. Some are now asking whether the rape crisis that has so enraged India is partly the consequence of sex selection abortion. From a Time essay by Erika Christakis:

Growing evidence suggests that in countries like India and China, where the ratio of men to women is unnaturally high due to the selective abortion of female fetuses and neglect of girl children, the rates of violence towards women increase. “The sex ratio imbalance directly leads to more sex trafficking and bride buying,” says Mara Hvistendahl, author of Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men. A scarce resource is generally considered precious, but the lack of women also leaves many young men without marriage partners. In 2011, the number of cases of women raped rose by 9.2 percent; kidnapping and abductions of women were up 19.4 percent. “At this point, we’re talking correlation, not causation. More studies need to be done….[But] it is clear from historical cases and from studies looking at testosterone levels that a large proportion of unmarried men in the population is not a good thing,” says Hvistendahl.

No, it’s not. But sex selection abortion is not a good thing on its face, regardless of harmful correlations or consequences.

It is very scary when a state wants to dehydrate a citizen. That happened several years ago in the Haleigh Poutre case in Massachusetts.  Haleigh was a 12-year-old child abuse victim beaten viciously by her step father into unconsciousness. Within days of her injury, doctors said she would never awaken and the state immediately sought court approval to dehydrate her to death. Luckily for Haleigh, the bureaucratic requirements took enough time for her to prove her doctors dead wrong by awakening. Today, she is moving on with her life–no thanks to the state social workers who advocated for her death rather than her life until she became clearly conscious.

In New York, a court has removed a wife from guardianship of her apparently unconscious husband, and the court appointed guardian wants him dehydrated to death on advice of doctors. Terri Schiavo’s brother, Bobby Schindler, has stepped in and asked to be named guardian. From The Leader story:

In 2007, Sara Harvey was removed as her husband’s guardian when a judge ruled she was ill-suited to care for him and did not follow the advice of medical professionals. The county was named Gary Harvey’s guardian. In 2009, Chemung County planned to remove Gary Harvey’s feeding tube on the advice of doctors, but the move was blocked. A do-not-resuscitate order remains in place. Later in 2009, Schindler joined Sara Harvey’s cause, saying she had the right to regain guardianship of her husband and take him home to care for him there.

After filing his guardianship request, Schindler said: “I have raised the question many times, ‘How can Chemung County, guardian of Mr. Harvey, be acting in his best interest when they, in fact, tried to kill him?’ From all indications, it appears that Mr. Harvey has been warehoused and denied the opportunity to receive the care and rehabilitative services that would benefit his condition.”

I have seen cases where guardianship was removed solely because the family member wouldn’t agree to dehydrate. I don’t know if that is the case here. But even if she is unable to personally provide his care, that doesn’t mean her opinion about her husband’s continuing existence should be disregarded. As Bobby Schindler told me:

How ironic. When my sister’s husband wanted her dehydrated, we were told that spouses should decide. Now, when the spouse doesn’t want him dehydrated, her opinion apparently doesn’t matter.

Go, Bobby! Go!

The euthanasia movement rarely tells the full truth about its objectives. Activists pretend that their goal is only to legalize “voluntary” terminations, or in the USA, to restrict killing to the already dying whose suffering–a very elastic term in euthanasia advocacy–cannot otherwise be controlled.

But once a society accepts the premise that killing is an acceptable answer to human suffering, eventually concepts such as “voluntary” and “only for the terminally ill,” fall by the wayside. Look at the Netherlands, where 45% of neonatologists (according to a Lancet study) have committed infanticide and doctors engage in non voluntary euthanasia–euphemistically called “termination without request”–without fear of any significant legal or professional consequence. 

Now, a bill soon to be introduced in the South Australia Parliament–where euthanasia is always bubbling on the legislative stove–would permit people to be killed by doctors based on via instructions made, catch the irony, in a “living will.” From Adelaide Advertiser story:

State Labor backbencher Steph Key is working on new voluntary euthanasia legislation and will meet with interest groups at the end of this month. While she stressed she was still finalising her plans, Ms Key said she would prefer the option of voluntary euthanasia outlined in a living will, as is done in Belgium, to other models in places like Switzerland or Oregon in the US that require the patient to carry out or administer euthanasia themselves.

A living will allows a person to take control of end-of-life medical decisions by indicating if they would prefer or refuse treatment for future illnesses. Under Ms Key’s preferred model, a person would be able to state in a will that if they find themselves in “a situation where their life is intolerable in a medical sense then . . . they would like to follow through with the option of voluntary euthanasia. That doesn’t mean that you have to follow through with that necessarily or you can’t change your mind,” Ms Key said. However, she said the decision should be made before a person became too sick.

This is really insidious. Many people think they would rather die than experience a significant disability or cognitive impairment.  But when their worst fear take place, they may not feel that way at all.  But under this proposal, their no longer existing younger incarnation would be able to order their current self killed–and practically speaking, it wouldn’t really matter whether the to-be-killed person still wanted to die or not, especially if he or she couldn’t communicate well. And it would certainly open the door to putting grandma out of our or society’s financial misery.

People are so worried about becoming unloved burdens or being ill thought of if they experience a serious incapacity. Proposals like this tell them they are right.

An interesting blog entry over at Psychology Today focuses on the crucial issue of human exceptionalism (and also, this less crucial blog). The author, Gregg Henriques, Ph.D., agrees with me that, “We are unique beings that warrant special moral value,” and much to my delight, justifies the belief from an explicitly “secular humanist”perspective. From, “On Human Exceptionalism:”

The system I have developed for unifying psychology argues strongly that humans are a unique kind of animal. However, in contrast to many traditional positions that differentiate animals from humans (e.g., Descartes’ substance dualism), the unified theory claims animals are mental and most are conscious (see here for a recent declaration on animal consciousness by some well-known neuroscientists). Humans are unique in that they have a self-consciousness system on top of the conscious system shared with other animals.

What does Henriques mean?

Humans are as different from other animals as animals are different from plants. Whether it is writing a blog, composing a sonnet, leading a revolution, attending a class, building a computer, and on and on, it is an empirical fact that human behavior exhibits a whole separate dimension of complexity. To deny this or to claim that this observation is only based on speciest wishful thinking lacks intellectual integrity.

Bingo!  He goes on:

Human cognition advanced to allow for human language (an open symbolic syntactical system of information processing that is, despite some claims to the contrary, a fundamentally different kind of communication/information processing system). Although language was a great advantage, a problem emerged because human language affords a window into the mind. This is the problem of social justification—for the first time in evolutionary history, our ancestors were asked about and thus had to justify (give reasons for) their behavior. I have explained elsewhere why the problem of justification gave rise to the human self-consciousness system and the human culture.

We are the justifying animal. And that opens up a whole new, qualitative dimension of existence. It is not that other animals don’t have minds. That is an obviously misguided claim. Instead, it is better to think of it in terms of humans having two minds, whereas other animals only have one. Thus, the answer to HE is not that humans are exceptional because they are conscious and feel—other animals are conscious and feel. But humans are exceptional in that they have the capacity for self-conscious justification, which in turn is the engine that builds human cultures and knowledge systems about truth, goodness and evil. In short, HE is ultimately justified by the fact that humans alone can justify.

Brilliant! And not a soul in sight.

The bureaucrats are coming!  The bureaucrats are coming!  Where? Right into your doctor’s office and examination rooms, as may soon be required under the Affordable Care Act via required use of government certified ”shared decision making” educational materials. From, “Shared Decision Making to Improve Care and Reduce Costs,”co-authored by Obamacarian Ezekiel Emanuel in the New England Journal of Medicine:

…decision aids should include questions to help patients clarify their values and understand how those values affect their decisions; information about treatment options, presented in a balanced manner and in plain language; and up-to-date data from published studies on the likelihood of achieving the treatment goal with the proposed intervention and on the nature and frequency of side effects and complications. In addition, it would be helpful to include validated, institution-specific data on how often the specified procedure has been performed, the frequency of side effects and complications, and the cost of the procedure and any associated medication and rehabilitation regimens. We believe that decision aids should be written at an eighth-grade level and should be brief.

I am not sure dumbing down complex issues and physician/patent communication serves either’s best interests.  Be that as it may, doctors and patients should already be engaged in “shared decision making.”  Moreover, no one is opposed to improving patient education materials.  But I worry that government “certified” patient education documents could easily be written to persuade patient’s into making the bureaucrat-preferred decision–not necessarily the right decision for the individual–much in the same manner that some advance directives make it very easy to refuse treatment than request it. 

If the use of the materials were optional, I wouldn’t complain.  But that isn’t what the authors propose. 

Many decision aids have already been rigorously evaluated, so CMS could rapidly certify these tools and require their use in the Medicare and Medicaid programs. To give such a requirement teeth, full Medicare reimbursement could be made contingent on having documentation in the patient’s file of the proper use of a decision aid for these 20 procedures.

I would think any doctor worth his or her MD degree would object to being required to engage in decision-making discussions in a connect-the-dot, bureaucrat-prescribed manner.

Worse, to coerce compliance, doctors who don’t use the required materials would be punished:

Providers who did not document the shared-decision-making process could face a 10% reduction in Medicare payment for claims related to the procedure in year 1, with reductions gradually increasing to 20% over 10 years.

Medicine should be a profession, not a technocracy. But Obamacare was designed to drive health care away from the former and toward the latter. As the experience of the NHS shows–oft documented here, for example with the Liverpool Care Pathway–centralized control of health care is neither good for patients or their physicians.

I have a better idea: Let’s tell the government to stand back and let doctors practice medicine without the bureaucrat in the room.

Transhumanists and other assorted immortalists take notice: Rather than quasi starve yourselves, perhaps now you can safely stuff your faces. A new study published by the AMA indicates that being overweight (as opposed to severe obesity) may result in a longer life. From the AMA press release:

In an analysis of nearly 100 studies that included approximately 3 million adults, relative to normal weight, overall obesity (combining all grades) and higher levels of obesity were both associated with a significantly higher all-cause risk of death, while overweight was associated with significantly lower all-cause mortality, according to a study in the January 2 issue of JAMA. “Estimates of the relative mortality risks associated with normal weight, overweight, and obesity may help to inform decision making in the clinical setting,” according to background information in the article…The researchers found that the summary HRs indicated a 6 percent lower risk of death for overweight; a 18 percent higher risk of death for obesity (all grades); a 5 percent lower risk of death for grade 1 obesity; and a 29 percent increased risk of death for grades 2 and 3 obesity.

Hmmm. Maybe this is the time to remember screenwriter William Goldman’s maxim about Hollywood: “Nobody knows anything.”

Besides, I think we spend too much time worrying about this. As Emerson noted, it’s not the length of your life but the depth. Still, all things being equal, I’ll take both, thank you very much. Whatever.

Archeologists working on an ancient site in Vietnam have found strong evidence that people there 4000 years ago cared well for people with disabilities.  From the New York Times story:

Almost all the other skeletons at the site, south of Hanoi and about 15 miles from the coast, lie straight. Burial 9, as both the remains and the once living person are known, was laid to rest curled in the fetal position. When Ms. Tilley, a graduate student in archaeology, and Dr. Oxenham, a professor, excavated and examined the skeleton in 2007 it became clear why. His fused vertebrae, weak bones and other evidence suggested that he lies in death as he did in life, bent and crippled by disease.

They gathered that he became paralyzed from the waist down before adolescence, the result of a congenital disease known as Klippel-Feil syndrome. He had little, if any, use of his arms and could not have fed himself or kept himself clean. But he lived another 10 years or so. They concluded that the people around him who had no metal and lived by fishing, hunting and raising barely domesticated pigs, took the time and care to tend to his every need.

What? No euthanasia of the disabled, as in the Netherlands? No suicide clinics to which disabled attend, as in Switzerland?  No health care rationing based on “quality adjusted life years” as in the UK?  No ancient Kevorkians with carbon monoxide cannisters or Final Exit Network types with their helium and plastic bags?  Hmmm. Perhaps they were more advanced than some contemporary cultures.

No, I don’t want to hurt pandas. But I do want scientists to experiment on their blood, which apparently, contains a powerful antibiotic. From the Telegraph story:

Scientists have discovered that the animals, of which there are around 1600 in the wild, produce a powerful antibiotic in their blood stream that kills bacteria and fungi. They believe the substance could be used to develop potent new treatments against drug resistant superbugs and other diseases.

Thanks to already conducted research, scientists can now synthesize the antibiotic. But to get there, pandas were used instrumentally–and good for the researchers who did!

Animal rights activists–not to be conflated with animal welfare–insist that humans have no right to experiment on our equals, the animals, for any reason and regardless of any benefit to humans.  Many also claim that we derive zero scientific and medical benefit from animal research–a self evident lie. If they had their way, we wouldn’t even know about this new development.

So, what’s it to be?  Treat pandas and other animals as equals or engage in properly conducted animal research to develop new medical treatments?  That’s a classic no-brainer.

Colonialism used to be about the rich exploiting the resources of other lands. Now, biological colonialism (as I call it) finds well off (mostly) Westerners exploiting destitute people in developing countries for their body parts and functions, essentially using people as natural resources.

Renting uteruses of destitute Indian women for their gestational capacities–just one form of BC–is apparently on the rise. From a story in the Independent:

Stephen Hill and his partner Johnathon Busher first held their twin girls in their arms less than 12 hours after their birth in a Delhi hospital last April.The gay couple, from the West Midlands, had been together for 18 years when they decided they wanted a family.

In 2011, they travelled to India and agreed a contract with a clinic in Delhi where Mr Hill’s sperm was used to fertilise an egg from a donor they had selected, and the resulting embryo was implanted in a surrogate mother. When the twins were born there was an “awkward moment” before the surrogate mother agreed to hand them over, as her husband had been telling medical staff the infants were his own. “She was reminded that it was a deal and she was fine. She was a little bit too attached and she needed to be reminded,” Mr Busher said. “We produced the contract and we were able to take them out of the hospital. We were so happy our feet didn’t touch the ground.”

How nice for them, but the mother left behind isn’t so happy because she became attached to the babies from nine months of gestation. It could have been worse: Some of the women in India whose bodies were rented in the fertility industry have died. 

You see, she didn’t matter.  She was just a “gestational carrier,” in the dehumanizing parlance of the IVF industry. What counts is our sense of entitlement–to a baby, to a kidney, to experiment results, sexual release, etc. Biological colonialism objectifies and exploits vulnerable and desperate human beings.  It should be stopped. 

One one hand we hear clarion warnings about elder suicide–and I share the worry.  On the other, suicide for the elderly is sometimes promoted as beneficial in mainstream media outlets. Talk about mixed messages!

Latest example of pro suicide advocacy: Salon has published a piece by a columnist who writes on elder issues arguing that suicides among the ailing elderly should be approved as a benefit to them, their families, and society.  From, “Let’s Talk About Dying,” by Lillian B. Rubin:

At 88-going-on-89 and not in great health, what’s cowardly about my deciding to turn out the lights before putting my family through the same pain they’ve already lived through with their father and grandfather? What’s courageous about spending our children’s inheritance just so we can live one more month, one more year? Is it courage or cowardice to insist on staying alive at enormous social cost – 27.4 percent of the Medicare budget spent in the last year of life – while so many children in our nation go hungry and without medical care? Is it cowardice to decide not to live with the pain of an ever-diminishing self — a body that’s always reminding us it’s there, a mind that forgets what it wants us to remember?

Courage isn’t the issue. The equal value of all of us is at stake.

Let’s look at it from a different angle for a moment. What if Salon published a piece by a gay man who said he believed suicide was proper for people like him because of discrimination he had experienced, family rejection, he was HIV + and was sick of taking the medication to hold AIDS at bay, etc.? The screaming–properly–would never stop. We would say, NO! We want you with us, not killing yourself. Shouldn’t our elders’ lives be equally valued as those of other despairing people?

Rubin raises the usual bloody flag of suicide promoters, that are more or less forced to let people die in agony:

“One way or another,” writes Sherwin Nuland in “How We Die,” “the rescue credo of high-tech medicine wins out as it almost always does.” Recounting the words and feelings as a young physician after resuscitating a dying patient, Nuland continues, “Kneeling on that bed, doing CPR, felt not only pointless, but like I was administering final blows to someone who had already had a hard enough life. Why was I forced to crack this person’s ribs? Why couldn’t we let the patient die in peace?”

That’s what Do Not Resuscitate Orders are for–to prevent such awful scenarios. Indeed, today the problem isn’t primarily receiving CPR when you don’t want it, but rather, convincing doctors and hospitals to provide it when you do want it if they think your quality of life isn’t worth the effort. 

After much back and forth, Rubin extols suicide:

So where am I in all this? The answer is: ambivalent but believing I’ll overcome it when the time comes – perhaps when I finish this article and have nothing left to say. What if I do the deed before it’s absolutely necessary? I shrug at the question, “So what?” I’ll have descended into the nothingness I believe awaits me and maybe for the first time in my life will actually rest in peace. What if I’m wrong about that? Well, I’ve lived a life of many risks with no regrets, and I’m tired

I get that elderly people get tired: My mom is 95. But this kind of advocacy is really dangerous to those elderly on the lip of despair. 

So, what’s it going to be? We won’t be effective in preventing suicides if we give societal approval to some. Or to paraphrase Lincoln: We can’t be half culture of life and half culture of death. Sooner or later we will become all one thing or all the other

James Watson, the co-discoverer of the DNA double helix demonstrated that just because one is a brilliant scientist, that doesn’t mean he or she is also a good ethicist.

And now, we have another example: Sir John Gurdon, who won the Nobel Prize for early work on cloning frogs, has come out in favor of human reproductive cloning. From the Daily Mail story:

‘I take the view that anything you can do to relieve suffering or improve human health will usually be widely accepted by the public – that is to say if cloning actually turned out to be solving some problems and was useful to people, I think it would be accepted,’ he said. During his public lectures – which include speeches at Oxford and Cambridge Universities – he often asks his audience if they would be in favour of allowing parents of deceased children, who are no longer fertile, to create another using the mother’s eggs and skin cells from the first child, assuming the technique was safe and effective.

‘The average vote on that is 60 per cent in favour,’ he said. ‘The reasons for “no” are usually that the new child would feel they were some sort of a replacement for something and not valid in their own right. ‘But if the mother and father, if relevant, want to follow that route, why should you or I stop them?’

I don’t know why so many scientists take such a crass utilitarian view of things, but let’s unpack this for a moment. First, polls show overwhelming opposition to reproductive cloning. Be that as it may, note how Gurdon doesn’t appear to care about the impact on the future cloned child of being a “replacement.” Only the feelings of the parents matter. This is in keeping with the growing belief that people not only have the right to a baby, but to have a baby by any means they want, and indeed, the baby they want–in this example, custom manufactured.

But let’s dig a little deeper. What kind of experiments would it take for reproductive cloning to be “safe?”  Here’s how biologist and stem cell researcher, David Prentice (now with the Family Research Council). put it back in 2003 when I interviewed him for my book Consumer’s Guide to a Brave New World:

Scientists would have to clone thousands of embryos and grow them to the blastocyst stage [one week] to ensure that part of the process leading up to transfer into a uterus could be “safe,” monitoring and analyzing each embryo, destroying each one in the process.  Next, cloned embryos would have to be transferred into the uteruses of women volunteers [or implanted in an artificial womb].  The initial purpose would be analysis of development, not bringing the pregnancy to a live birth.  Each of these clonal pregnancies would be terminated at various points of development, each fetus destroyed for scientific analysis.  The surrogate mothers would also have to be closely monitored and tested, not only during the pregnancies but also for a substantial length of time after the abortions.

Finally, if these experiments demonstrated that it was probably safe to proceed, a few clonal pregnancies would be allowed to go to full term.  Yet even then, the born cloned babies would have to be constantly monitored to determine whether any health problems develop.  Each would have to be followed (and undergo a battery of tests both physical and psychological) for their entire lives, since there is no way to predict if problems [associated with gene expression] might arise later in childhood, adolescence, adulthood, or even into the senior years.

Does that sound moral or ethical to anyone?  It is manufacturing human life and then treating it as if it were nothing more meaningful than potter’s clay.

UK medical student, Lindsey Fitzharris, writing in the unlikely venue of the left wing newspaper The Guardian in the wake of the Newtown atrocity, worries that our therapeutic society has sucked the vitality out of our understanding of “evil.”  From, Adam Lanza: The Medicalication of Evil:”

Anyone who has been watching the news over the past few days will have heard the gunman, Adam Lanza, described as “sick,” “disturbed” and “defective”. The perpetrator may indeed have suffered from mental conditions that led to his homicidal attack, but even before anything was known about Lanza (including his name), many people in the media assumed a crime of this magnitude could only be committed by a mentally unstable individual. Very little discussion – if any – was given to the role of personal responsibility in this tragic event.

It is an age-old question: what is evil? The answer, of course, is subjective. Many scholars have argued that our concepts of deviant behaviour have changed over time, first being seen as a sin, then a crime and now a medical problem.

She wonders why so many of us embrace transforming evil to a more benign concept of illness:

Why do we find this narrative so appealing? Why are we so quick to assume a person such as Lanza is “sick?” In an article for Parade Magazine in 2002, Andrew Vachss, a crime fiction novelist and child protection consultant, noted that explanations of mental illness offer “the possibility of finding a cure” and “assures us that the predator didn’t really mean it”. In other words, it is unsettling to admit that someone who commits a horrible crime may have done so knowingly and without remorse.

I think that is true, as far as it goes. But there is more to the problem: Admitting that “evil” exists is a way of implying that there is an ultimate source of judgment beyond ourselves.  That hurts our pride because that would mean that at least some behaviors are wrong objectively, meaning beyond determination by applying modern values,  sensibilities, and law (or government).

Beyond the metaphysical, admitting the reality of evil would also be a way of acknowledging the exceptional nature of human beings. We can’t have that! But only humans can be truly “good” or “evil” because only we are, within our very natures, truly moral agents.  Accepting the concept of evil interferes with the ideological goal of many to reduce us to merely another, albeit destructive, animal in the forest. In this sense, the evaporation of evil is a sign of cultural decadence.

Fitzharris notes that erasing evil from our perceptions destroys personal accountability:

While I do believe it is important to determine what factors may have led Lanza to open fire on Sandy Hook Elementary School – and whether this tragic event could have been prevented – I want to remind the US and the world of one thing: evil is about choice. Sickness is about the absence of choice.

So, how do we define evil without invoking the God against whom so many recoil? I like this one: “Evil is treating another human being as a mere object.”  Example: When a pod of male dolphins collectively force themselves on a female, it is just dolphins acting like dolphins. When men do that, it is gang rape, an act of evil.

Dolphins can’t choose to not engage in such brutal behavior.  Unless we have a true illness or injury that prevents us from knowing right from wrong–in other words, a bona fide psychosis–we can.  When we don’t, we should be held to account. And in the worst cases–such as Newtown–we should see the evil.

Refusing to acknowledge it doesn’t mean evil ceases to exist. Indeed, such wilfull moral blindness leads to treating symptoms rather than causes, to the detriment of us all.

A report out of Denmark says that 1 in 6 aborted late term babies there show signs of life after temporarily escaping death and being born. (Once a baby is born, he or she should no longer be considered a fetus.) From the Politiken DK story:

For the first time ever in Denmark, a survey has shown how many foetuses show signs of life following a late term termination, according to Kristeligt Dagblad. Previously, conventional wisdom has suggested that 10 per cent of foetuses gasped or showed other signs of life following a late term abortion between the 12th and 22nd week of pregnancy. But statistics from Denmark’s second largest maternity clinic at the Aarhus University Hospital Skejby show that out of 70 late terminations between August 2011 and November 2012, 11 – or 16 per cent – showed signs of life. Translated into national figures from 2010, during which 877 foetuses were terminate after the 12th week, the statistical figure for life signs in aborted foetuses would be 140.

That means the possibility of suffering. And here’s the proposed remedy:

The Danish Infant Death Association says parents should be given the possibility of choosing a potassium chloride injection to stop the foetal heart before a termination in order to ensure that the foetus is stillborn. The method is in use in the United States and elsewhere.

I didn’t know that. Note the use of the term “stillborn,” which implies a natural death when this is anything but. Ugly. Ugly. Ugly.

E.J. Dionne, defender of all things liberal, has come to the support of the anti-liberty Independent Payment Advisory Board. From, “Unreason on Healthcare:”

Or take the health care law’s creation of the Independent Payment Advisory Board, known as IPAB. It’s a 15-member body charged with finding ways of cutting the costs of treatment under Medicare. Congress would have the final say, but through a fast-track process. Yet the ink was barely dry on Obama’s signature of the Affordable Care Act when a group of Republican senators introduced what they called the Health Care Bureaucrats Elimination Act, to get rid of IPAB.

No, Congress wouldn’t have the final say. IPAB’s is the cornerstone for a looming bureaucratic state because its power supercedes even a presidential veto. Here’s now the “fast track” system–so glibly glossed over by Dionne–works, as described in my article, “Our New Obamacare Masters:”

• By January 15 each year, the Independent Payment Advisory Board must submit a proposal to Congress and the president for reaching Medicare savings targets in the coming year. The majority leaders in the House and Senate must introduce bills incorporating the board’s proposal the day they receive it.

• Congress cannot “consider any bill, resolution, amendment, or conference report  …  that would repeal or otherwise change the recommendations of the board” if such changes fail to meet the board’s budgetary target.

• By April 1, the committees of jurisdiction must complete their consideration of the proposal. Any committee that fails to meet the deadline is barred from further considering the bill.

• The secretary of health and human services must implement the Independent Payment Advisory Board’s proposal, as passed by Congress and signed by the president, on August 15 of the year in which the proposal is submitted.

• If Congress does not pass the proposal or a substitute plan meeting the Independent Payment Advisory Board’s financial target before August 15, or if the president vetoes the proposal passed by Congress, the original Independent Payment Advisory Board recommendations automatically take effect.

Further demonstrating the Star Chamber-like powers of the Independent Payment Advisory Board, Congress cannot consider any bill or amendment that would repeal or change this fast-track congressional consideration process without a three-fifths vote (60) in the Senate. Not only that, but the implementation of the board’s remedy is exempted from administrative or judicial review.

IPAB can’t ration care yet–the real death panel threat–but powerful voices are urging it be given that power. IPAB needs to be resisted by every legal means available until the Board is rendered truly–and merely–advisory.

This is a very bad sign of the times. A German poll finds that a majority would rather commit assisted suicide than be dependent for care. From the German Herald story:

Health officials have revealed shock poll results that show a majority of people would rather commit suicide than go into a care home in their old age.The study – carried out by a foundation for the terminally ill in Germany – recorded that 51 per cent of women and 49 per cent of men would prefer an assisted death to relying on others for their care.

Caring for others is a noble and loving part of the human condition.  But it needs people willing to be graciously cared for.

Also, call me a cynic but I worry that there is a disturbing corollary to this story: Could it be that people would rather that dependent family members die than care for them?  Perhaps that’s why elderly people so often say they don’t want to be “burdens.” They know that others feel the same way about them. 

An important corollary of human exceptionalism demands universal human equality. Lately, as we finally seem close to slaying the horrible racist beast, we have seen an unjustified assault on the value of Caucasoids of the XY chromosome persuasion. I protest over at my biweekly column at First Things. Some of it is about faith, but I think this is germane to our discussions here. From, “In Praise of Dead White Men:”

Recall that white men issued the Declaration of Independence’s “self-evident” assertion of universal equality. Three hundred thousand white Union soldiers gave their lives to free the slaves. Having been convinced of the sheer moral righteousness of the Suffragette cause, white men amended the Constitution to grant women the franchise. White men also risked their safety, and sometimes shed their blood, in solidarity with people of color to bring down Jim Crow. In short, but for the acquiescence of—and societal reform by—white men, we wouldn’t have reached the current better day in which an African American was twice elected president and the current female Secretary of State is his heiress apparent.To be sure, I am not at all pleased with many contemporary political and cultural trends. I believe too many conflate liberty with license and fear that some want to replace true equality with new categorically invidious divisions. Indeed, I worry that our society is in danger of turning away from Martin Luther King Jr.’s content-of-our-character Promised Land just when we have nearly reached the destination.

Anti white is as bad as anti black. Time to throw it all in the trash and get on with life.

I am not quite sure why the rights of nature movement doesn’t get more attention. Perhaps people think it is so crazy that it “can never happen here.”  But it is happening here. Nearly 30 municipalities have passed laws granting nature rights–which really means that anyone can sue to prevent any human activity with which they disagree. Moreover, when you say pond scum, mosquitoes, viruses, rats, weeds, etc. have “rights,” you have attacked human exceptionalism and diminished the concept of rights in the same way that inflation devalues currency. I mean if a snail has rights, what makes humans special?

Now Vermont is seeing the beginning of a campaign to place rights in the state’s constitution, akin to a right to life. (See the italicized portion.)  From the press release:

The Campaign has drafted a proposed Rights of Nature article to be voted on at Straffordʼs town meeting in March. It calls for an amendment to the Vermont Constitution that would “recognize in the law the natural, inherent and inalienable rights of forests, natural areas, waterways, and fish and wildlife populations of Vermont to exist, thrive and evolve.”

Marx feels that such an amendment would provide “an even playing field. People have rights, corporations have rights, and nature should have rights as well.” Marx does not envision the amendment as prohibiting logging or hunting, but rather ensuring that natural resources are managed in a sustainable and ecological manner. Environmental lawyer Gus Speth, author of America the Possible, notes, “The rights of nature movement, slowly building around the nation, is an effort to carry forward the land ethic of Aldo Leopold. It would be great to see a new amendment in the State Constitution.”

We can and do manage development and the extraction of resources without granting rights to nature. Indeed, Yellowstone is very well managed and Old Faithful hasn’t been deemed a person. (Don’t laugh. New Zealand has granted personhood status to a river.) This is about anti humanism, not proper regulatory control.

Will this take off in Vermont? I have no idea. I hope the state’s voters retain enough New England common sense to reject this drive out of hand. On the other hand, Vermont is a very liberal state and nature rights is a very liberal cause. So stay tuned.

I have written more extensively about nature rights here. Also, here.

In keeping with my policy of following up on stories I have covered here: As I predicted, Germany has passed a law protecting the religious liberty of Jews and Muslims who circumcise their sons.  From the Reuters story:

German politicians passed a law on Wednesday to protect the right to circumcise infant boys in a show of support for Muslims and Jews angered by a local court ban on the practice in May. The ban – imposed on the grounds that circumcision amounted to “bodily harm” – triggered an emotional debate over the treatment of Jews and other religious minorities, a sensitive subject in a country still haunted by its Nazi past. The outcry prompted Germany’s centre-right government and opposition parties to draw up legislation confirming the practice was legal – overruling the decision by a court in the western city of Cologne.

If Muslims weren’t involved, I wonder whether this law would have passed.  But I’ll be nice. A victory for religious liberty is a victory for religious liberty.

No! It isn’t the same as female genital mutilation.

Each year the Center for Bioethics and Culture asks me to predict the future year in bioethics, and each year, I generally nail it.  Last year was one of my best.  And that’s too bad, because last year was overwhelmingly awful for good policy and ethics.

For example, I was really right about the Supreme Court Obamacare ruling–and not just the “what” but the “why:”  From, “Predictions 2012: I Was So Right:

“Prediction 2: Obamacare’s Individual Mandate Will Be Declared Constitutional:” I really nailed this one: The Supreme Court, in an utterly incoherent 5-4 decision, declared the ACA to constitutional. Why do I say “incoherent?”

• First, Chief Justice John Roberts ruled that the individual mandate, requiring all to buy health insurance or face a penalty, was not a tax. That ruling allowed the case to proceed to ultimate resolution.
• Then, he ruled the ACA violated the Commerce Clause by regulating economic inactivity. That should have been the ball game.
• But in an act of audacious judicial activism, as if by magic, the “not a tax” was transformed back into a tax for purposes of finding the law valid.
• Et viola: An unconstitutional law was able to be declared constitutional by being both not a tax and a tax at the same time. Like I said: incoherent.

I explained last year why the Court would protect the validity of the ACA regardless of the legal merits:

I believe the majority of the Supreme Court will rule that Obamacare’s purposes are laudable, that universal coverage is equitable and necessary for the country’s future, and that since the mandate is a necessary element of making the new law work, it is constitutional. That may sound like bootstrapping, but there it is.

And so it came to pass. I scare myself sometimes.

If you want to see what else I predicted, here is the link to the original article.  And if you want to see how I did overall, hit the link before the quote.

I just posted about Princeton’s notorious bioethics professor, Peter Singer, embracing Aubrey de Gray’s anti-aging crusade.  As I read his piece, I was struck by Singer’s raging inconsistency about the moral unimportance of people not yet conceived.  But it didn’t fit in that post, so I write about it here.

Singer essentially claims that those not yet born have no cause for complaint if the interests of those alive now are put first. From, “Should We Live to 1000?”:

 If our planet has a finite capacity to support human life, is it better to have fewer people living longer lives, or more people living shorter lives? One reason for thinking it better to have fewer people living longer lives is that only those who are born know what death deprives them of; those who do not exist cannot know what they are missing.

Hmmm. But on page 186 of his book Practical Ethics, Singer claims that it is ethical and moral to kill an existing disabled baby to serve the interests of an, as yet, unborn sibling:

When the death of a disabled infant will lead to the birth of another infant with better prospects of a happy life, the total amount of happiness will be greater if the disabled infant is killed. The loss of the happy life for the first infant is outweighed by the gain of a happier life for the second. Therefore, if the killing of the hemophiliac infant has no adverse effect on others it would be right to kill him.

That’s the amorality of utilitarianism. There really are no fixed moral principles, only expedient analyses. If Singer wants a chance to experience near-immortality, the cost of the quest to the not yet born can be justified because they don’t matter yet. But when he wants to justify killing disabled babies, the lives of the not yet born matter more than the life of an already born infant–even if the latter-born sibling will never actually make it into this world. 

In other words, in Peter Singer’s moral universe, consistency doesn’t matter and principles need not be applied.

Euthanasia activists always promise that the killing will be strictly controlled. That’s the sales job. Once euthanasia/assisted suicide become legal and/or culturally accepted, all bets are off.  Accept the ideology that killing is an acceptable answer to human suffering and the guidelines cease to matter. Worse, very few continue to care

A 10-year review of how the euthanasia law has fared in Belgium–which among other wrongs has seen the coupling of E with organ harvesting–shows the pattern I described unfolding before our very eyes. From a report by the European Institute of Bioethics, “Euthanasia in Belgium: Ten Years On:”

From the time of its initial report and subsequent reports, the Commission for Control and Assessment acknowledged its inability to act going on to say that it is not capable of assessing the proportion of declared cases of euthanasia compared with the number of real cases which have actually taken place” Yet, in 2002 the stated objective of bringing euthanasia out of the shadows was a major argument made by those in favour of its legalization.

Yes, well talk is cheap. Once doctor-administered death is legal, such assurances become inoperative.  Indeed, as I have often reported here, the categories of the killable continually expand:

Initially legalized under very strict conditions, euthanasia has gradually become a very normal and even ordinary act to which patients are deemed “to have a right”. In the face of certain high profile cases, the evident relaxation of the very strict conditions has caused many reactions but also a total absence of any sanctions on the part of the Commission and a very conciliatory silence from the political establishment has given rise to a feeling of impunity on the part of some concerned medical practitioners, and to a feeling of powerlessness in those worried about where things are leading.

Both assertions are correct. As documented here, there has been at least one joint euthanasia of an elderly couple in Belgium, the Canadian Medical Association reported that nurses have been involved in killing patients, and many euthanasia killings are imposed without request or consent, etc. etc. And it doesn’t matter because the ideological premises and discriminatory quality of life view–the essence of euthanasia consciousness–prevail. Oh hum.

It looks to get worse, with Belgium poised to follow the Netherlands into infanticide:

Several neonatologists have drawn up a procedure which enables euthanasia of premature newborn infants or those presenting a handicap in one of the three following instances: either the infant has no chance of survival, or it is deemed to only have a very mediocre quality of life, or the outlook is poor and it is felt that the infant will suffer unbearable pain.

The Groningen Protocol [Dutch infanticide protocol] caused quite a stir in Belgium and a great many medical practitioners are of the opinion that since a “therapeutic” abortion is possible right up to the day before birth in the event of the child being handicapped, euthanasia of newborns ought also to be allowed under the same conditions.

Well, studies show it is already happening. This would just institutionalize the human rights abuse. But again, once the underlying premises of euthanasia are accepted, what’s to stop it?

But Wesley, at least Oregon is working, right? Wrong!

One of the (few, in my book) real achievements of bioethics was the institution of the legal right to refuse unwanted medical treatment. But some things done for patients in a hospital aren’t “medical” precisely, but rather, fall within the paramters of humane care. Keeping a patient warm, for example. Giving them oral food and water. Keeping them clean. And I would submit, turning the patient so they don’t develop bed sores.

But now, the bioethicist Art Caplan–working off the facts of a real case–discusses whether humane care should be withheld if the patient doesn’t want it.  From, “You MUST Let My Bedsores Kill Me. You MUST!,” published on Medscape:

What are the lessons to be learned from this refusal-to-be-turned request? For one thing, we need to be sensitive to the idea that it is as likely that someone may say “don’t turn me” as they may say “I don’t want any more dialysis” or “I want you to shut off my ventilator” or “take out my feeding tube.” Institutions may want to establish policies such as: “We always turn people and we do not shut off the heat in a patient’s room. There are certain things we are not going to do, and as soon as someone says they do not want that, we need to talk about moving them home or moving them elsewhere because there are some steps that we will not take here.” Patients need to know that. Hospital staff, ethics committees, and others may want to think about developing policies concerning requests that will not be honored.

At the end of the day, I think this man did have the right to say “don’t touch me.” I think he had the right to say “don’t turn me.” But if his decision started to affect nursing and staff morale and began to become a problem in the delivery of care for others, then I believe that is a factor that has to be considered when deciding whether to honor what he says. The nurses cannot work if the unit becomes a smelly, untenable mess, and although this man had his rights, other people have their rights too. If I thought the care of others was being compromised by these morale issues and staff problems, I might override a patient’s wishes. I might not honor his request in the name of other people’s rights. In my opinion, there may be limits to what you can request when it affects the care that others can receive. That is a tradeoff that has to be weighed at all times.

I think Art is too equivocal here. And more is involved than staff morale and a clean overall environment. Humane care should never be withheld. (For example, if a patient wants to self-starve and is otherwise capable of eating, I think the staff brings the tray even if the patient shouldn’t be force fed.)  

Refusing medical treatment–the administration or ingestion of medicines, surgeries, examinations, and the like–should be distinguished legally and morally from refusing non medical support that does not “unnaturally” (I am sure there is better term to use here) altar the body or its natural processes in any way.  More to the point, to not turn the patient is to actively harm the patient. (And, by the way, what about psychiatric intervention?) Similarly, a hospital should not leave a patient before an open window in winter without a blanket–even if that is what the patient wants. In other words, patients don’t have the right to force medical professionals to act unprofessionally. 

We sure have come to a pretty pass, though, when this has to be discussed.