No, I'm not waiting for Terri, she's not on my list. I'm patiently waiting for Michael, and he WILL come here.
Posted on 03/27/2005 9:54:12 PM PST by walford
... the bioethics world turned rigorously secular and veered sharply to the blue section of the color spectrum. A key factor in the rise of bioethics, Callahan wrote, was the "emergence ideologically of a form of bioethics that dovetailed nicely with the reigning political liberalism of the educated classes in America." Instead of the traditional emphasis on the sanctity of life, bioethics began to stress the quality of life, meaning that many damaged humans, young and old, don't qualify for personhood because their lives have lost value. The nonpersons should be allowed to die and in some cases be killed.
This explains why so few bioethicists have protested what the state and her husband planned for Terri Schiavo, who is severely damaged, but not in pain or dying, not brain dead, and in no position to protest her own execution on grounds that other people consider it best for her.
Bioethics has hardened into an activist ideology that pervades the medical world, the schools, and government. This explains why Leon Kass, a moderate conservative who heads the president's committee on bioethics, is under such fierce attack and why Princeton University picked Peter Singer as its first scholar in bioethics. Singer thinks parents should be able to kill disabled newborns.
Among bioethicists, Kass says, "there is a kind of condescension toward the views of the general public [and] a very real danger that what constitutes meaningful life among the intellectual elite will be imposed on people as the only standard by which the value of human life is measured." Under pressure from bioethicists, norms have been collapsing. Fifteen years ago, as author Wesley Smith writes in his 2002 book The Culture of Death, legally assisted suicide was unthinkable. So was harvesting the organs of terminally ill patients, which is done today and approved by bioethicists...
"Thousands of ethicists and bioethicists, as they are called, professionally guide the unthinkable on its passage through the debatable on its way to becoming the justifiable, until it is finally established as the unexceptional..."
The ominous overtone suggests these "damaged humans" may be used as salvage, like a '62 Ford rusting away in an urban junkyard, to improve the quality of life for those who meet their criteria for "nondamaged".
"there is a kind of condescension toward the views of the general public [and] a very real danger that what constitutes meaningful life among the intellectual elite will be imposed on people as the only standard by which the value of human life is measured."
This should concern us, as we must all age. For those of you that don't want to be fed - FINE! put in in a will. Just don't force your policy for YOU on the rest of us. That also applies to the Starbucks-sippers described in this paragraph.
Gee hope we do not have to face and handle something else we never dreamed we would see.
You mean I might become someone else's choice someday?
Hmmm.
(steely)
Check out the official blog of the American Journal of Bioethics:
http://blog.bioethics.net/
99 44/100% pure Bush hate from beginning to end.
No, I'm not waiting for Terri, she's not on my list. I'm patiently waiting for Michael, and he WILL come here.
Hmmm...funny, I've always considered Pete Singer damaged and useless, maybe he should go first and show us all how easy and peaceful it is. When he's almost gone, Felos can channel him for us so we can "feel" what it's like.
Cindie
Very, very important. These new "ethicists" have rejected the morality which has guided Western civilization since the beginning of the Christian era, and now we have self-described Christians cheering them on. The end of this can only be mass killings.
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