This Blog considers assisted suicide/euthanasia, bioethics, human cloning, biotechnology, radical environmentalism, and the dangers of animal rights/liberation. My views expressed here, as in my books and other writings, reflect my understanding that the philosophy of human exceptionalism is the bedrock of universal human rights. Or, to put it another way: human life matters. (The opinions expressed here are my own and not necessarily those of any organization with which I am affiliated.)
Apparently the first patient to receive a "face transplant" is doing well. Good. I never understood what all the fuss was about anyway. If we can transplant livers and kidneys from cadavers, why not facial flesh?
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 7:27 PM
8 Comments
I am a Senior Fellow in Human Rights and Bioethics at the Discovery Institute and the author of 12 books, including A Rat Is A Pig Is A Dog Is A Boy, which is relevant to the issues considered by this blog.
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8 Comments:
I think the issue was not the use of human tissue here but the questionable priority and irony of a brain dead woman (from suicide) donating to a woman who attempted suicide (overdose / coma led to desperate pet dog chewing on her face)
Well, that raises several issues, doesn't it? But I will just comment on one. If the deal was that the woman should not receive the transplant because she was to blame for her predicament because it resulted from an attempted suicide, that leads to an abyss without bottom, doesn't it? Wouldn't it preclude expensive care for most people who contract an SDT, people who are obese, people who smoke, people who OD, etc. I really don't think we want to get that judgmental in our health care decision making.
My impression was that the questions were two-fold:
First, if the woman receiving the transplant was mentally unstable, was she perhaps a poor candidate for such an experimental procedure, which might possibly fail and leave her worse off (as far as appearance and health) than she was before?
Second, I gather the idea is that when you have a face transplant you then look like the other person, so in some odd sense you are switching your visible identity with the other person's. I gather part of the idea is that it would be macabre for relatives of person A to run into recipient, person B, and feel like they are meeting their dead relative face to face. This issue of course doesn't arise for internal organ transplants.
Since I have questions about vital organ transplant anyway, I'm not sure how much difference the second of these makes, but I do suspect it was what was in people's minds when they questioned a face transplant in particular.
I might be wrong, but I don't think you look like the other person because you still have your own bone structure. Anyone?
Well, when John Travolta took Nicolas Cage face and then Cage found Travolta's face in Face / Off ... Oh, you mean movies might not be exactly real??
Well, again, the one article I read months back that referred to the suicide seemed to be raising it because the whole face-transplant thing isn't easy. I gather it's quite a physical ordeal and an emotional ordeal, too. And so the question was whether she was still suicidal and might actually be emotionally unable to handle everything she would go through over years (and the rest of her life, really, with immuno-suppressants and rejection worries) from having the transplant.
Some type of non-transplant reconstructive surgery, while probably less satisfactory in terms of looks, would have been a less lifelong ordeal as far as the medical treatment itself.
Lydia -
She suffered from two near-rejections of the face transplant. If she was mentally unstable, these near-rejections themselves might have harmed her more mentally than they would have someone who started out less depressed. On the other hand, there's a chance that because she'd hit rock bottom, she had no where to go but up, and was able to handle the situation better than a "stable" person might have. It's a toss up. We can't get inside her head - we'll just have to take what information we get and keep our fingers crossed/keep praying for her.
Wesley -
Now, I myself am all for transplanting organs and the like, and human flesh is another organ, but I have to admit that I suffer from a lot of negative feelings in this case, and I think it has to do with the fact that it's a *face* and not an internal organ. I'm not saying my distaste for the procedure is rational; I know that it's a gut-level feeling and it's not based on any kinds of facts because I haven't had the nerve to look into the whole thing. I wonder how many other people who have a negative attitude toward the face transplant reject it based on the same kind of emotional over-reaction that I have. That could be what "all the fuss was about," you know.
I agree with Leon Kass, T.E.: The wisdom of repugnance should be listened to, but should not be determinative. In restoring a person's looks that have been devestated by catastrophic illness or injury, I think we should overcome repugnance.
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