Washington legalized assisted suicide several years ago, and efforts are underway there to normalize overdosing as a legitimate medical treatment. Toward that end, a cancer center has established what amounts to a suicide clinic called (of course) the Death With Dignity program, for use by its patients who want to commit suicide. From the Clinical Psychiatry News story:

The program’s policy – written by the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance’s medical director and approved by a majority of the medical executive committee members, as with any clinical policy – requires that patients request information about medically assisted suicide from their physicians, or that these clinicians raise the topic, to be considered for referral. Participation is entirely voluntary for medical staff and faculty members.

Every patient who is a potential participant is first assigned an advocate, a licensed social worker employed by the Alliance, who assists patients, family members, pharmacists, and physicians throughout a multistep process of participating. This advocate also tracks compliance with required documentation for the state Department of Health.

The advocate, as well as the attending physician, ensures that all potential participants are aware of alternatives to medically assisted suicide, such as palliative care and hospice care. The patient’s terminal status is verified, and if the attending physician doesn’t wish to participate, a prescribing physician and a consulting physician are chosen from a group of willing providers.

Did you notice that suicide can be the doctor’s idea?

This is an extremely disturbing development because it gives the imprimatur of a respected cancer center to suicide. 

Not that we should be surprised. Medicalizing and normalizing suicide for the ill and disabled has been in the works for some time. From a 1970 California Medical Association’s California Journal article on “death control,” predicting:

The traditional Western ethic has always placed great emphasis on the intrinsic worth and equal value of every human life regardless of its stage or condition . …  This traditional ethic is . . . being eroded at its core and may eventually be abandoned . . . [Hlard choices will have to be made . . . that will of necessity violate and ultimately destroy the traditional Western ethic with all that portends.  It will become necessary and acceptable to place relative rather than absolute values on such things as human lives. . . . One may anticipate . . . death selection and death control whether by the individual or by society.*

And so, what was then unthinkable–a cancer center establishing a suicide clinic–is now being touted as the model for the country. Woe is us.

* “A New Ethic for Medicine and Society,” editorial California Medicine, Vol. 113, No. 3, September 1970, pp. 67-68. 

What comes next? That has usually been a question of religion or philosophy. Some look to a heaven or a hell. Others to a reincarnated existence. Some, to nothing at all. For materialists, who claim there is no evidence at all of an afterlife, a soul, or anything other than the chemicals and substances of the body, dust we were, and quite literally and completely, dust we shall become.

And yet, thanks to the miracles of modern science, the many reports of the near death experience have convinced some that the afterlife is real, while others say they are merely the imaginations conjured by a dying brain. Whatever the actual cause, scientists are taking the phenomenon seriously now. It turns out that studies show that the “memories” of the “afterlife” or “hallucinations” of people supposedly utterly unconscious from cardiac arrest are often more vivid than those of conscious life. From the CNN story:

Laureys and his team studied the near-death memories of people who survived — in particular those of coma patients — with the help of a psychological examination. The Memory Characteristics Questionnaire tests for sensory and emotional details of recollections and how people relive them in space and time. In other words, it gauges how present, intense and real a memory is. They compared NDEs with other memories of intense real-life events like marriages and births, but also with memories of dreams and thoughts — things that did not occur in physical reality. The researchers paralleled new memories with old ones. And they compared the patients who had NDEs with groups of others who didn’t.

Memories of important real-life events are more intense than those of dreams or thoughts, Laureys said. “If you use this questionnaire … if the memory is real, it’s richer, and if the memory is recent, it’s richer,” he said. The coma scientists weren’t expecting what the tests revealed. “To our surprise, NDEs were much richer than any imagined event or any real event of these coma survivors,” Laureys reported. The memories of these experiences beat all other memories, hands down, for their vivid sense of reality. “The difference was so vast,” he said with a sense of astonishment. Even if the patient had the experience a long time ago, its memory was as rich “as though it was yesterday,” Laureys said. “Sometimes, it is hard for them (the patients) to find words to explain it.”

Whatever this is all about, I think it demonstrates that we still have no real idea what actually causes “consciousness,” nor for that matter, what it actually “is.”

And indeed, Laureys reports that coma patients, not just those who are dying, also experience “NDEs”’ Hmmm. Perhaps we should consider that before we take away their food and water or try to redefine them as “dead” so we can harvest their organs.

Centralized control of health care is catastrophic. The classic example is the Liverpool Care Pathway, originally created to ensure that NHS patients receive good pain control, under centralized control it often became a form of connect-the-dots medicine, even, back door involuntary euthanasia. (I write about the Pathway in detail in this just published Human Life Review article.)

The NHS encouraged the use of the Pathway with payments, which some critics saw as a encouraging abuses. Now, the Daily Mail reports, that is about to end. From the story:

Cash bribes to hospitals to put patients on to the controversial Liverpool Care Pathway will be ended, families have been told. The disclosure means that the NHS payments – which amount to at least £30million – are likely to be stopped later this year. A Health Department inquiry is underway into the Pathway, which was originally developed to ease the last days and hours of dying patients.

Care Minister Norman Lamb spoke to families of Pathway patients in Leeds in the first of a series of meetings designed to feed their views into the inquiry, which was launched in February and will report in the summer.  One family at the meeting said that their 82-year old grandmother died over a period of 12 days after fluids and food were withdrawn.  They said that their grandmother, who had early stage cervical cancer, was eating and drinking before being put on the Pathway.

“Bribes” is too strong a word, but “debacle” certainly isn’t. This is all a warning for us under Obamacare–not that the technocrats will give a fig.

Switzerland is Jack Kevorkian as a country. Just as suicidal people used to fly to Michigan to be made dead by him, they now fly to Switzerland to be made dead at Swiss suicide clinics.

Some say that this is a reason to legalize assisted suicide. In that way, this argument goes, people can commit suicide at home. The latest such case comes out of Canada where a disabled woman with a terminal degenerative condition is planning on killing herself in Switzerland. From the CBC story:

The Canadian government says it won’t reopen the debate over assisted suicide, as a Winnipeg woman makes plans to die in Europe by the end of this month. Susan Griffiths, 72, has left loved ones and friends behind to carry out a planned assisted suicide. “If it was legal [in Canada], I’d have done it now. Definitely. Months ago, probably,” she said. “I knew that my future was absolutely hopeless.”

Griffiths has multiple system atrophy, a rare and debilitating disease with no cure. If left to run its course, the disease would likely leave her bedridden, blind and unable to walk or talk, she said. “All your body parts break down and quit working,” she said. “You would have to have people do everything for you. Every function that a human needs, another person would have to do it. They’d have to feed you, take you to the bathroom — and it’s horrific to me.”

The actual lessons from this very difficult situation is quite the contrary of that which assisted suicide advocates and many in the media assert. First, note that she has been with us longer than she would otherwise have been precisely because assisted suicide is illegal. Second, by claiming that people should be able to commit suicide at home rather than fly to Switzerland, they essentially claim that suicide is a necessity. That’s the last thing we should tell suicidal people. Third, this is a very difficult case, but even here there are significant and important care opportunities that the media doesn’t discuss. Not only that, but promoting assisted suicide in cases such as this tells dependent people and their families that dead is better than disabled.

Changing public policy to make suicide easier to accomplish isn’t merciful. Indeed, making suicide difficult is the true mercy because it saves lives. In fact, there are people who wanted to commit suicide–but didn’t because it was not easy to access–who were later glad to be alive, and this includes people with terminal illnesses. Studies show it and I have met such grateful people. Why that doesn’t seem to matter much in this debate demonstrates how seductive death has become in our decaying culture. 

Kansas Governor Sam Brownback is poised to sign into law a bill declaring that life begins at fertilization. From the Reuters story:

Kansas is set to enact one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the nation which defines life as beginning “at fertilization” and imposes a host of new regulations.

Some think this could destroy the abortion right by declaring that embryos and fetuses are human beings. (Ditto, laws declaring “personhood” begins at fertilization.) I think not. The Supreme Court doesn’t care whether embryos and fetuses are human lives–and neither do most pro choice activists.  For the Court majority and the activists, the right to personal autonomy of the mother trumps the humanity of the unborn baby.

But I think the law could act to effectively prohibit embryonic stem cell research and human cloning in the state. Think about it. If an embryo is a fully protectable human life–and since in ESCR and cloning no woman is being forced to do anything with her body–the conflicting rights between autonomy of the mother and the life of the unborn are not present.  Hence, destructive embryo research and human cloning in Kansas could be stopped. 

And what would be the legal objection? I can think of one: Some scientists claim a fundamental constitutional right to conduct research, which if imposed by a court, would require a compelling state interest to prohibit or regulate just about anything scientists might want to do. I have been waiting for such a lawsuit to be filed for awhile now. This could spark it. 

I am reading an interesting book on the history of bioethics called The History and Future of Bioethics, by John H . Evans. He references the growing technocracy in our society in which democracy and republicanism is being supplanted with a rule by experts. He writes:

The first characteristic of technocracy…is a “deep seated animosity toward politics itself” and toward the public ability to make decisions. But it is not just that with technocracy, experts will rule. The second and more important characteristic of technocracy is that expert rule is justified by making policy decisions seem to be only about facts, which are fixed; not values which very from group to group. This is accomplished by removing debates about values in politics and making political decisions solely about selecting the most efficacious means for forwarding taken-for-granted values.

For example, Obamacare is blatantly about furthering the technocracy, as in the Independent Payment Advisory Board.

But I think the (outrageous, in my view) ruling by a judge forcing government to allow the morning after (potentially) abortifacient pill to be sold to girls over the counter like it already is to women, is another example. Note that “doing what is right,” has nothing to do with it, but that the decision is driven by the precise technocratic imperative described by Evans. From the NYT story:

In his ruling, Judge Edward R. Korman of the Eastern District of New York accused the Obama administration of putting politics ahead of science. He concluded that the administration had not made its decisions based on scientific guidelines, and that its refusal to lift restrictions on access to the pill, Plan B One-Step, was “arbitrary, capricious and unreasonable.” He said that when the Health and Human Services secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, countermanded a move by the Food and Drug Administration in 2011 to make the pill, which helps prevent pregnancy after sexual intercourse, universally available, “the secretary’s action was politically motivated, scientifically unjustified, and contrary to agency precedent.”

But mere efficacy, and even safety, shouldn’t be the be all and end all. Surely morality, ethics, and yes–working through what should be the best policy to further societal well-being–should still matter in a democratic society, particularly regarding the regulation of strong drugs that impact on the lives of children!

Alas, the ruling class–which definitely includes judges, particularly at the federal level–want technocracy. After all, that will put them in complete charge by brushing aside the roiling and messiness associated with freedom, allowing them to impose their “taken-for-granted” values on everyone, which they think would be best for society.

In this case, the taken-for-granted values being furthured are that minors should have sex whenever and as much as they want, that parents should not be able to impose their own sexual morality on their children, and that the job of society is to keep “consequences” of having sex at bay for sexually active children through open access to contraception, abortifacients, and abortion–without notice or consent of parents if that is what the kids want. 

By the way, I think HHS Secretary Sebelius and Obama share these values. Thus, I predict either no appeal or a weak attempt aimed at losing the case. 

I always enjoy being invited to secular and liberal college and university campuses–most often by pro life student groups–to speak at open meetings to which all are invited  I am always deeply impressed by the courage, fortitude, imagination, and good spirits of these young people–who usually face disdain, even open scorn, from peers, repeated put downs by professors, occasional threats of violence, and sometimes, an uncooperative attitude from the administration. I was told of one case in which a pro life girl was punched to the ground simply because she was handing out anti abortion literature–and even though the assault occurred on campus, the administration wouldn’t investigate.

Along these intolerant lines, the student government at Johns Hopkins University shamefully voted to deny official club status to Voice for Life, a student group, because they are supposedly akin to “white supremacists” whose sidewalk counseling constitutes “harassment.” Such a designation would prevent the group from using campus resources for meetings and from obtaining any financing, clearly an attempt to suppress heterodox views. Par for the course.

JHU’s administration has intervened, declaring that sidewalk counseling is free speech, not harassment. Good for them. That should help Voices for Life in appealing its unjust blackballing. (Remember when universities were havens for heterodox speech?) 

Society rightly celebrates the courage of abolitionists, suffragettes, civil rights leaders, gay rights groups and others who have stood or stand against strong cultural tides to advocate for minority views. Pro life student groups are following in that courageous tradition–and without the usual applause. Here’s looking at you, kids!  Wear their scorn like a badge of honor.

The media have become pro suicide. You see this all the time, now. When elderly, disabled, or ill people kill themselves, reports depict the deed as empowering or laudable exercises in personal autonomy.

Latest example: The Australia media has played up an elderly woman–who announced ahead of time she was going to kill herself–and then did the deed. From The Age’s story, ”Rational suicide: Why Beverley Broadbent Chose to Die:

Beverley Broadbent was not dying of a terminal illness, nor was she depressed or unhappy. But at 83, she wanted to die. After living a rich and satisfying life, the Brighton East woman said the ageing process had come to feel like a disease that was robbing her of her physical and mental fitness. In February, she said she had had enough. ’’I look well and I walk well so people think I’m fine. But I have so many things wrong with me,’’ she said. ‘’The balance is gone. It’s taking so much time for me to keep fit to enjoy myself that there’s not enough time to enjoy myself.’’

In several interviews with Fairfax Media, Ms Broadbent said she planned to take her own life so she could have a peaceful, dignified death. She said she did not want her health to deteriorate to the point where she had dementia or found herself in a nursing home with no way out. The environmental activist chose to tell her story because she believed many elderly people wanted to die when they felt their life was complete, but lacked the means to go gently. ’’I can’t understand why people who really want to can’t have the means to go with the help of a doctor in a dignified manner at the time that they choose,’’ she said.

This is really shameful, and reminds me of the Belgian joint euthanasia of an elderly couple that their neighbors knew was being planned, yet did nothing. The media knew ahead of time that Broadbent was planning suicide, and saw it merely as a great story–and one that could further the cause of legalizing assisted suicide, which the media tend to support–and not a cause to find her help. And what kind of message does it send to other elderly people who may be experiencing difficulty continuing on? Then, almost as an insult, after describing Broadbent’s suicide as “rational,” they offer a suicide prevention hotline number!

Not only that, but The Age’s story–and so many others like it–violate the Word Health Organization media guidelines on not touting suicide because it leads to copycat deaths. 

As I said, the media have become pro suicide–at least for some. This story is just one example. 

Scientists are keeping aborted fetal ovaries alive in order to scavenge their eggs. From the Daily Mail story:

Scientists are ready to plunder the ovaries of aborted babies for eggs to use in IVF treatment. Experiments have taken the process almost to completion, it emerged yesterday. They raise the nightmare prospect of a child whose biological mother has never been born. The news, from a scientific conference in Madrid, was greeted with widespread revulsion at how far science is testing ethical frontiers. Experts warned of appalling emotional and biological problems.

But fertility doctors say the development could ease a worldwide shortage of donated eggs for women who cannot produce their own…Scientists have known for some time that female foetuses develop ovaries after as little as 16 weeks in the womb. Now researchers from Israel and the Netherlands have kept ovarian tissue from aborted foetuses alive in the laboratory for several weeks. They stopped the experiment at the point where they believed eggs were about to be produced. Chief researcher Dr Tal Biron-Shental said it was ‘theoretically possible’ that with extra hormone treatment they could have produced mature eggs suitable for IVF use.

This isn’t new. I reported on these efforts a few years ago. Some have even called for paying women who want to abort to carry their babies longer so that the cadaver will provide more useful parts.

By the way, it isn’t IVF for which the eggs will be required, but human cloning. Somatic cell nuclear transfer cloning requires a human egg for each try and eggs are in short supply. Indeed, I have frequently noted that the technology has been held back by what I call the “egg dearth.”  

But if they can get unlimited eggs from dead fetuses and women, cloning will not only be successfully performed (which, I predicted, will happen this year) but eventually perfected and put to concerted use. Then, it is on to all the Brave New World technologies–such as genetic engineering–that require cloning to develop. 

Killing the fetuses and keeping their ovaries alive. That makes the scientists complicit in the abortions. Think about what we are becoming. 

Centralized health care destroys professionalism in medicine. It takes well-meaning approaches to difficult cases, and turns it into a connect-the-dots enterprise that treats patients as members of categories rather than individuals.

As I have written frequently here and elsewhere, the Liverpool Care Pathway–which was designed to humanize end-of-life care in NHS hospitals and nursing homes–was subjected to precisely that kind of deconstruction. As psychiatrist Eugene Breen writes in the British Medical Journal:

There is no quality control or accountability and there are no penalties. You can hear people say “the mother in law doesn’t look too good, I wonder if she is dying? We ought to get her as quickly as possible to that pathway to get her the best accredited care.” This is the problem. It is a free for all and it is euthanasia lite. The fast forwarding of dying saves money, brings closure, and frees up relatives’ time and suffering, but it disrespects patients’ basic rights to life and dignity. It is impossible to control such a programme with any respectable level of professionalism or care for the person involved.

Bingo.

Obamacare’s intense centralization of healthcare into the federal bureaucratic black hole put us on that same path of systemic destruction. 

Up to ninety percent of babies–ninety!–diagnosed with Down syndrome in pre-natal testing never see the light of birth. (Ditto other genetic conditions such as dwarfism.) Every once in a while, in the face of this carnage, a loving parent of a Down child takes to the media to defend their child’s worth and to share the challenges and joys that come with raising their son or daughter with special needs.

The Atlantic, publishes the latest such article, in which college educator Theo Malekin writes to laud the spectacular medial care and supportive services his daughter Hazel has received, and to tell others that children with Down have lives worth living–and parenting. From, “A Generational Shift in Understanding Life With Down Syndrome:”

I cannot think of any parents of a child with Down syndrome who would give them up for anything. Love has a way of making statistics irrelevant, and it brings its own kind of knowing. I do not love my daughter any less because she has Down syndrome. Her diagnosis says very little about who she is. She is not a disease or a syndrome but an individual: affectionate, naughty, infuriating at times, stubborn, self-willed and utterly charming. Certainly she has medical problems and developmental challenges not faced by other children. I’m not saying those don’t exist. But they’re one part of a much bigger picture…

You cannot know if someone else’s life is worth living without asking them and without even knowing them. A disability does not necessarily stop you living a full, satisfying life. Oddly enough, I’m not sure that disabilities have anything to do with living full satisfying lives. When it comes to Hazel, her life is not a burden to her family but an unending source of delight. For my part, I cannot imagine life without her. But most importantly, her life is valuable to herself, and definitely worth living.

That’s great, but predictably inadequate: Whether because of belief, desire not to judge, or simply not wanting to get into a sticky wicket, Malekin doesn’t bring the logical thrust of his argument all the way home:

This is not intended as an argument against abortion. It is an argument for giving prospective parents of children with Down syndrome a full picture of what their life will be like. 

But it should be an argument against eugenic abortion!  We have no hesitation telling people in other contexts that certain legal behaviors are wrong. We do it all the time: We tell people not to smoke, not to get fat, not to own guns, not to generate greenhouse gasses. Surely, we can tell people they really shouldn’t abort babies because they have Down syndrome.

If a happy father of a Down daughter won’t make that important argument, who will? So I applaud Malekin for speaking out about the value of people with Down and for deeply loving his Hazel. But more is needed–a robust, unapologetic, and rousing call to, “Let these live!”  

I had an article in the Weekly Standard last week warning that the international ruling class wants to “define torture down” to include mere policy differences with those favored by the Cultural Left–particularly around abortion, transgender issues, “sex workers,” drug use, and the like.  

Now, almost on cue, the International Commission of Jurists castigates Malta (of all places) for purported human rights abuses based on precisely such policy differences. First, Malta is pro life!. From the ICJ Submission to the Universal Periodic Review of Malta: 

Malta’s Criminal Code prohibits the termination of pregnancy, specifying that both women who procure miscarriages and medical professionals who perform or assist them may be held criminally responsible. The terms of the law do not envisage any exception and as a result even abortion for therapeutic purposes, such as to save the life of a pregnant woman, is subject to this prohibition. These provisions undermine Malta’s compliance with its obligations to ensure women’s enjoyment of the rights to life and highest attainable standard of health, and freedom from torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, as enshrined in the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), the ICCPR, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) and the Convention against Torture. 

One can disagree with pro life laws, but torture and inhuman treatment? No. 

Also, Malta doesn’t let transgenders marry!

Under Maltese law, transgender individuals are not permitted to marry their opposite sex partners.41 In May 2011, the Constitutional Court affirmed the decision of the Director of Public Registry that a woman named Joanne Cassar, who was identified male at birth but had subsequently undergone gender reassignment and had changed her sex in her birth certificate, could not marry her boyfriend. The Court ruled that Joanne Cassar could not legally be considered a woman for purposes of marriage. The Constitutional Court thus rejected the applicability of Goodwin v United Kingdom, in which the European Court of Human Rights had held that States must recognize a change of gender identity and protect the right to marry for individuals who have changed their gender. 

Again, one can think such a law is wrongheaded, un-empathetic even. But heterodox social policies should not be conflated with most profound human rights abuses, such as disappearing political opponents or having official rape rooms as a tool of regime coercion.

The political left—which includes the U.N. bureaucracy and NGOs such as the ICJ—tactically redefines words and terms that have specific meanings so as to stigmatize controversial policies and positions with which it disagrees. By wielding the T-word like a political cudgel in order to shame countries like Malta to legalize abortion and get on the LGBT policy bandwagon, however, these internationalists demonstrate a depth of intellectual dishonesty that provides abundant reason for Malta (and the U.S.) to hold on tight to their national sovereignty.   

(This report by the pro life NGO, C-FAM, provides deeper context.)

Do women have a right to a dead  fetus baby? Apparently so, according to a Florida Planned Parenthood official who testified that if a baby is born alive in a botched abortion, the mother should decide whether the abortionist should kill or care for the newborn. From the Weekly Standard story:

Florida legislators considering a bill to require abortionists to provide medical care to an infant who survives an abortion were shocked during a committee hearing this week when a Planned Parenthood official endorsed a right to post-birth abortion. Alisa Laport Snow, the lobbyist representing the Florida Alliance of Planned Parenthood Affiliates, testified that her organization believes the decision to kill an infant who survives a failed abortion should be left up to the woman seeking an abortion and her abortion doctor. 

“So, um, it is just really hard for me to even ask you this question because I’m almost in disbelief,” said Rep. Jim Boyd. “If a baby is born on a table as a result of a botched abortion, what would Planned Parenthood want to have happen to that child that is struggling for life?”

“We believe that any decision that’s made should be left up to the woman, her family, and the physician,” said Planned Parenthood lobbyist Snow.

Remember, Peter Singer was appointed to the most elite bioethics chair in the world at Princeton–not in spite of, but because–he preaches for the propriety of infanticide. And despite all the fuss over the pro “post birth” abortion article published in the Journal of Medical Ethics awhile ago, many of the most mainstream bioethicists support the agenda because they oppose human exceptionalism and believe that humans with low present capacities lack full moral value.  

Thus, I don’t know why anyone is surprised about the PP endorsement. It is just another indication that infanticide continues its slow movement toward respectability. 

By the way: If a baby born during a botched abortion can be killed, why not also an unwanted baby born in the usual manner?

As the technocrats seriously ponder imposing health care rationing, government bureaucrats have raised a trial balloon that could result in Medicare and Medicaid paying for sex change surgeries. From the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services announcement:

CMS opens this reconsideration of the NCD on Surgical Treatment for Gender Identity Disorder. Section 140.3 of the NCD Manual. The initial 30-day public comment period begins with this posting date, and ends after 30 calendar days. CMS considers all public comments, and is particularly interested in clinical studies and other scientific information relevant to the topic under review. Surgical Treatment for Gender Identity Disorder (formerly referred to as transsexual surgery in 140.3) is currently noncovered under the Medicare Part A and Part B programs. The existing policy, which became effective in 1981, states that transsexual surgery is considered experimental.

Surgical sex change is a consumerist, not a medical procedure. It shouldn’t be covered by tax payers whether or not it remains experimental. And pay close attention to this: If Medicare and Medicaid covers it, believe me, Obamacare won’t be far behind. 

This is how the Left intends to use health care to advance its social agendas. Talk about busting the bank! “Social justice” is killing our society.

Thanks to CNS News for disclosing this in this report. The MSM wouldn’t. 

Discover has the latest in a long series of science writers claiming that the growing ease of genetic tests will open the way for a new eugenics. But not to worry, the new version of the old evil won’t be forced by the state. No, no: It will be a choice eugenics. From, “The Inevitability of Eugenics…as Preventive Health,” by Razib Kahn:

The real fundamental issue here is that genes are at least somewhat in the picture, and genes are mystically powerful. But modern eugenics is really just part of the broader portfolio of preventative health. SinceNeuroskeptic’s post on the “new eugenics” a few years back there has been great advancement, such as noninvasive prenatal screening for chromosomal abnormalities. There has been moderate controversy, but in a world of routine in vitro fertilization and occasional surrogacy this does not rise to the level of alarm or salience. The primary point here is that the “new eugenics” is not going to be about a top-down agenda about remaking the genome of the human race and producing a lineage of Übermensch. It is going to come into being through a collective series of choices by couples and individuals in terms of what their vision is for a healthy and happy child. It will happen piecemeal, in banal and unnoticed steps.

“Preventive health” was the point of the original eugenics; improving the human herd to prevent “the idiots” and “unfit” from dragging the free thinkers “fit” into a societal and financial sink hole. It was called “racial hygiene” in 1930s Germany, which passed eugenics laws based on those then in existence in California.

Not only that–and pay very careful attention here–the old evil had the enthusiastic backing of “the scientific consensus” and members of the progressive ruling elite of that era. So, I believe, does the new eugenics, and the euphemistic relabeling as  ”preventive health” should have us all taking warning! Eugenics as preventive health won’t remain any more voluntary than the original eugenics. 

If you doubt me, think Obamacare. Think about how the Free Birth Control Rule already forces business owners and religious organizations to violate their faith precepts to accomplish the overarching moral purposes of the progressive coalition and ruling elite. More, think about the cost control imperative we see developing like a violent thunder storm. Have you noticed that the technocrats and our betters in government happily dictate our personal behaviors to promote “wellness” and save money on health care?

Anyone who thinks that in such a cultural paradigm, “preventive health” eugenics would long remain voluntary hasn’t noticed–or agrees with–the outright statism that Obamacare has unleashed. And we are barely into the “liftoff” stage.

Animal rights, properly understood, is not animal welfare: It is an ideology that creates moral equality between people and fauna.

PETA is the most famous–but actually, not the most dangerous–purveyor of this anti-human ideology. It recently made news by attacking a 14-year-old boy, who wants to sell a cow to raise money for a field trip to the UK. From the FNN story:

When 14-year-old Logan Ward came up with the idea to raffle off a cow in order to raise money to go with a non-profit group on a trip to Europe, he never expected it would mean he’d be receiving antagonizing emails from PETA. But that’s exactly what happened. The animal rights group not only sent Logan nasty messages, but also photos like the one shown here, depicting women wearing lettuce as underwear.

The original email, from PETA’s Whitney Calk, read in part: “It just seems a little strange to me that you feel that someone needs to die for you to go on your school trip… I feel like we can both surely agree that there are several other humane ways to fund raise these days that don’t involve a dead, chopped up corpse.”

That’s mild compared to PETA’s usual style. For example, it hands “comic” books to children attacking “mom” for wearing fur and “dad” for fishing. As I reported in my book, A Rat is a Pig is a Dog is a Boy: The Human Cost of the Animal Rights Movement:

[I]n its second “PETA Comic,” Your Daddy KILLS Animals!, an anti-fishing diatribe the cover of which vividly depicts an “evil daddy” wearing a hat affixed with lures and fish hooks (and a skull and crossbones) eviscerating a fish.  In lurid large red letters, the cover states: “Ask your daddy why he’s hooked on killing!” On the inside, the children are told: “Imagine that a man dangles a piece of candy in front of you.  So you reach for it.  But, as you grab the candy, a huge metal hook stabs through your hand and you are ripped off the ground…You’d feel really scared wouldn’t you?  That would be an awful trick to play on somebody, wouldn’t it?”  Then, comes the anthropomorphism so thick it can be cut with a knife. “Fish may not be cuddly or cute like kitties and puppies, but fish are really smart.  They learn from each other and can remember things for a long time. Just like people, fish eavesdrop to get info and they can even use tools!”  And it wouldn’t be a PETA Comic without warnings against parents killing pets. “Until your daddy learns that it’s not ‘fun’ to kill, keep your doggies and kitties away from him.  He’s so hooked on killing defenseless animals that they could be next!”  

Can you imagine telling a child that if their dad fishes, he might kill the family cat?

PETA activists–as distinguished from many of its naive contributors–are zealots and bullies. They are not about “being nicer to animals,” but about ending all animal domestication of every kind. They have apologized to the kid–because sometimes even bad publicity isn’t good publicity–but the attack on a boy raising money for a field trip is a small example of the true nastiness of this awful organization. 

P.S. PETA has killed adoptable cats and dogs. 

There is an ongoing–and potentially lethal–discussion ongoing in bioethics and moral philosophy that would redefine death from the irreversible cessation of cardio/pulmonary function or neurological function, to a diagnosis of permanent unconsciousness. But the unconscious breathe and their bodies function, meaning that they are clearly not biologically dead.

But logic and accuracy are impediments to the agendas being pursued. Indeed, redefining death would break the back of the sanctity/equality of life ethic permitting the fulfillment of several (dire, from my POV) long-time utilitarian societal goals: 

• Destroy human exceptionalism by denying intrinsic human dignity;
• Make the value of human life subjectively depend on quality of neurological function. e.g., “personhood theory;”
• Allow the profoundly cognitively disabled to be organ harvested before biological death, in essence killing for organs;
• Allow experimentation on living human bodies under the pretext that they are mere cadavers;
• Stop all medical care, as now happens with those declared dead, to save resources.

Now, I can add a sixth purpose (or consequence); breaking the general prohibition against active euthanasia.

Heretofore, the redefine death crowd have primarily limited their targets to those with profound and permanent cognitive disabilities caused by injury or disease, such as the late Terri Schaivo. But now, an article published in the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, (38: 190–204, 2013) by Samuel H Lipuma, argues that permanently sedating a dying patient–a legitimate palliative technique, rarely required–is the same thing as euthanasia. From the article:

The thesis being defended here is not just that there are many similarities between CSD [continuous sedation until death] and PAS/E physician-assisted suicide/euthanasia] but rather that CSD is equivalent to PAS/E. CSD, as it has been defined and clarified here, is the permanent elimination of consciousness from a patient. To have one’s consciousness permanently eliminated is to die. It is a death of higher brain functioning.

Note that it isn’t as if the patient’s consciousness couldn’t be restored. It is that doctors don’t plan to do so because the patient would be in intractable pain. (Also note that most cases–perhaps all, I don’t know–of palliative sedation don’t actually require permanent sedation until death as a matter of medical necessity. That it is sometimes done that way, doesn’t mean it has to be.) Also note that the sedated patient’s body continues to function, often without medical assistance such as a respirator. Thus, by any objective measure, the patient is not dead.  

Nor is permanent unconsciousness the same thing as “brain death,” since death by neurological criteria requires that every function of the brain and each of its constituent parts cease functioning as a brain (not that every brain cell be dead). The brain of a sedated patient has not ceased functioning as a brain. The drugs have merely rendered the patient unconscious.

Not only that, but supposed permanent unconsciousness isn’t necessarily unaware. There have been many recorded instances of unconscious patients, with no seeming higher brain function, recalling precisely what happened during that time. And recent neurological screening breakthroughs have shown that some supposedly permanently unaware patients are able to interact.  Heck, we don’t actually know what consciousness is!

Back to Lipuma. He, and his ilk, seek to redefine death from a biological into a sociological meaning, from a condition that can be determined (at least theoretically) objectively through medical means, to a subjective approach in which death to one person is not death in another. From his conclusion: 

The thesis being defended here does not involve moral evaluation. It claims that CSD is indistinguishable from PAS/E. To say that CSD occurred would be to say that killing occurred. That does not make it immoral because context determines when killing is or is not justifiable. Self-defense involves killing but is morally justifiable. CSD is also morally justifiable because it rests on the principles of respect for patient autonomy, mercy, compassion, and physician nonabandonment…

The present concern is to demonstrate the claim that no significant differences can be made between acts of CSD and those of PAS/E. For those insisting that life and death should be understood biologically,the case could be made that CSD is not death. This can only be done at the expense of a definition of death based on consciousness and all other human awareness and instead forces us into a much less desirable “one size fits all” notion of death. This does not do justice to being human and the significance that consciousness and all other human awareness abilities have to human life. Identifying CSD with higher brain death is a more precise and accurate characterization of what occurs. Clarifying our actions to the greatest possible extent should help us improve the care of the immanently dying. That is the fundamental inspiration behind this analysis.

Like I always say: If you want to see where the culture is going wrong, just read the professional journals.

The researchers are busy creating computer models and testing hypotheses to see if they can predict mortality accurately–as a way, I suspect, of justifying health care rationing. My concern was heightened by a study just published as a letter in the March 6 Journal of the American Medical Association, in which the authors claim that they were able to predict likely mortality 10-years out. From, “Predicting 10-Year Mortality for Older Adults:”

Extending the index from 4 to 10 years did not diminish the model discrimination (validation cohort,C statistics 0.817 vs 0.834; P= .35), suggesting that the risk factors important for 4-year mortality prediction are also important for 10-year mortality prediction. The model compares favorably with other mortality indexes that predict mortality beyond 7 years…Patients identified by this index as having a high risk of 10-year mortality may be more likely to be harmed by preventive interventions with long lag times to benefit, whereas patients identified as having a low risk of 10-year mortality may be good candidates for such interventions.

Thus, (say) if a colonoscopy is identified as not having a positive cost benefit for seven or more years (as the article indicates), such screening for those whom the computers predict are likely to die within ten years might not be covered. Why? Both because the potential immediate risk of harm from the test or a false positive is deemed more likely than an actual health benefit, and because your lower overall predicted life expectancy means that the statistically unlikely chance of catching a cancer among your cohort is not worth the cost of all those screening tests. 

In essence, this approach would seem to be pointing toward an “expected life years” form of rationing (let’s call it) under Obamacare, with decision-making based in large part on cohort membership and computer model projections.

If an expected life years form rationing is ever accomplished, the next step will be the even more subjective quality adjusted life year rationing model, already in use in the UK. Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy ride. 

Bill Gates is offering $1 million to the inventor that can build a better condom. From the FNN story:

Philanthropist and Microsoft founder Bill Gates is offering start-up funds of $100,000 to anyone who can come up with the “next-generation condom,” according to Grand Challenges in Global Health. The Round 11 of Grand Challenges Explorations initiative through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is aimed at improving the lives of the world’s poorest people – and a new, innovative condom could do just that. The condom must be effective at lowering the chance of transmitting sexually transmitted diseases, and offer incentive for men and women to use it.

If chosen, the Foundation would continue to fund the condom up to $1 million. “To overcome persistent health and development problems, we need new, game-changing ideas,” Chris Wilson, director of Global Health Discovery & Translational Science at the Foundation, said in a press release.  “Inspiration can come from anywhere, and we are hopeful that this new round of Grand Challenges Explorations will uncover innovative approaches to improve lives around the world.” According to the press release, the new condom will “preserve or enhance the pleasure so as to increase uptake and also promote its regular use.”

I still believe that relying on the condom as the primary diseases inhibitor works at cross purposes with the goal of better public health outcomes. It is like telling people they really don’t have to stop smoking, just use a filter or a water pipe to reduce disease.

If we want to spread the devastating HIV and STD epidemics, telling people that they can have an exuberant sex life and safety too seems less wise than trying to create a sense of sexual restraint and probity as both the cool and responsible approach. But issuing a clarion call for self control is disfavored because the international community disdains moralism and sees open sexuality as a liberty right. And yet, the ABC approach (abstinence, be monogamous, use condoms.) worked very well in Uganda–at least until they backed off from the A and B.

If you build a better condom will they beat a path to your door?  I doubt it. The problem is that pushing enhanced sexual sensation in a condom also pushes more sex, and the only reliable answer to lowered rates of infection is less sex other than with an uninfected mutually monogamous partner.

But then, I am an old guy who believes that we have the capacity to control our hormones, if not because it is “right,” at least because it is best for our health.  

Washington State may require all insurance policies to cover abortion. From the AP story:

The Reproductive Parity Act, as supporters call it, would require insurers in Washington state who cover maternity care — which all insurers must do — to also pay for abortions. The bill passed the state House earlier this month by a vote of 53-43, though it faces an uncertain future in the Senate. A similar bill in the New York state Assembly has been introduced each session for over a decade but has never received a public hearing. “This is a core value for Washingtonians,” said Melanie Smith, a lobbyist for NARAL Pro-Choice Washington. “We should protect it while we still have it and not leave access to basic health care up to an insurance company.”

Non therapeutic abortion isn’t basic “health care,” for as I pointed out here, it is a “consumerist” rather than a “medical,” procedure.

That point aside, passage of the law will force business owners who are religiously and morally opposed to abortion into a hard position–one that could deleteriously impact their employees: Cover abortion against their beliefs or drop coverage and pay the Obamacare fines. That will then force religiously or morally opposed individuals into the same dilemma. Some employers would even leave the state.

Alas, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act–which so far seems to be protecting most business owners religiously opposed to contraception–does not provide a safe harbor for state laws. Thus, business owners and insurance purchasers would have to litigate against the law based on the First Amendment. Alas again, precedent would not be on their side because the law would be of general application and not aimed at religious expression.