New York Doctor to testify in favor of Sustaining Life Support for Orthodox Jewish Man

By Alex Schadenberg

A neurologist from New York has agreed to testify as a medical expert on behalf of the family of Samuel Golubchuk an Orthodox Jewish man from Winnipeg Canada.

Dr. Leon Zacharowicz agreed to work on the case pro-bono after being contacted by Agudath Israel of America. Dr. Zacharowicz is planning to go to Winnipeg sometime this summer to examine Golubchuk himself in preparation for the trial that is currently scheduled for November 2008.

Dr. Edward Reichman, a leading expert and lecturer in the field of medical ethics stated that according to Jewish ethics "If a person’s life is dependent on the ventilator, the decision to take them off the ventilator would be equal to homicide"

Dr. Reichman further stated to The Jewish Star that "The overwhelming majority of rabbinic authorities maintain that it would be prohibited to remove the respirator, if that would lead to the individual’s death."

Dr. Reichman predicts that "This case could be a real test case. It could become a terrible trend if it gets pushed through. It would be a tragedy, definitely for Orthodox Jews, but also for other patients. If it gets passed in Canada, it can succeed in the United States as well."

http://www.vosizneias.com/16520/2008/05/28/winnipeg-canada-ny-doctor-to-testify-in-favor-of-sustaining-life-support-for-orthodox-patient/

Save the Liver!

By Jennifer Lahl

Today's LA Times is covering a story on four Japanese gang figures who received liver transplants at UCLA. The story raises all of the ethical issues surrounding organ donation and transplantation. How do we ethically share organs which are scarce and precious and needed for saving lives?

Access to organs has always raised ethical problems. Who is our neighbor, and how far do we need to open our borders and let people into the donor pool? The story states that these were Japanese bad dudes and one in particular, Tadamasa Goto, was allowed into the states in exchange for leads and information on Japanese criminal gangs. While here, he was in need of a liver transplant and the story goes that he "got a liver and was laughing back to where he came from." Laughing mainly because in exchange for useless information he got away with a life saving liver transplant. He took cuts and jumped the line.

Who's worthy of the much needed organ has also been part of the debate. Does the alcoholic in need of a liver transplant get put to the bottom of the list over a person who's had a chronic liver disease from birth? Or in this case, does the law abiding citizen get to move to the head of the line over the law breaker? The argument has often been that the system needs to be blind to criteria of worth because this is so subjective and slides us into suggesting people have a duty or obligation to die because their life is not worth living or their life is not worth saving. We certainly wouldn't suggest the converse. That we begin killing those on death row for their organs. Often blind lotteries are suggested after the medical criteria has been assessed. Does the organ match the recipient? When directly competing for the much needed organ, all things being equal, who needs the transplant most urgently?

And this debate often boils down to a discussion on the allocation of scarce resources. Fact is, we don't have enough organs to meet the needs of those waiting on lists for a transplant. This story states that 100 people died waiting on the list, while the bad guys got away with organs. So how do we divvy them up fairly?

What often makes people really queasy is just feeling that the current organ donation program isn't fair. Justice matters. One comment in the LA Times piece states what many people feel. They've chosen to opt out of the DMV pink dot organ donor program because the system is corrupt. The United Network of Organ Sharing should take notice that ethics do matter and that people do have an innate sense of injustice. Once the ethics are shored up, public confidence will be restored and people will probably be glad to put that pink dot back on their license.

AB 2747 Passes Assembly

By Bobby Schindler

AB 2747 passed the California State Assembly by two votes. The bill will now go before the State Senate. This is not good news. The past two years California has failed to pass physician assisted suicide legislation, so Compassion and Choices, strong advocates for assisted suicide, adjusted their approach and are now leading the charge for the passage of AB 2747. From the story:

This new bill represents a strategy change for assisted suicide proponents and paves the way for their future efforts.

This bill would mandate that physicians, nurse practitioners and physician assistants give a patient, while being diagnosed with a terminal illness or with a prognosis of one year to live, information about pain management options that are fitting only for persons who are imminently dying.

Wesley has commented on AB 2747 and its hidden and potential dangers here, and here. Marilyn Golden, a disability rights advocate, who has commented before on the seriousness of this bill weighs in here:

"It sets the stage for Compassion and Choices' hoped-for future legalization of assisted suicide in California. It would mandate that doctors discuss with patients still a year from death, unusual end-of-life courses of action including voluntarily starving and dehydrating themselves. The opposition by the doctors who are most experienced with end-of-life care, such as the Association of Northern California Oncologists, illustrates how medically inappropriate these mandates are."

Time is running out to stop AB 2747 and if it passes the Senate then it would be up to Governor Schwarzenegger to veto the bill to stop it from becoming law. And with the Governor on record as saying that he is "very open- minded" on the issue of assisted suicide, it doesn't look good, particularly with the language of AB 2747 so deceptive.

A Life Ends That Was Worthy of Life

In this utilitarian age when bioethicsts tell us that some lives are not worth living based on "quality of life" judgments, it was interesting to read about Dianne Odell, who just died at age 61. She had polio when she was 3 and spent most of her life sustained by an iron lung and the loving care of her family. From the story:

Life at 133 Odell St. came to revolve around Dianne, with her parents taking turns going to church so someone was always home to feed her and talk to her. The family never took vacations. At Christmas, they would squeeze Dianne, inside the metal machine, into the dining room for the holiday dinner

But today, some utilitarian bioethicists think such devotion is beyond the pale, and indeed, that the requirement of family sacrifices on behalf of an elderly or disabled person triggers a duty to die. Writing in a way that could be applied to Odell's situation, John Hardwig wrote in favor of the duty to die in the Hastings Center Report:

A duty to die is more likely when continuing to live will impose significant burdens--emotional burdens, extensive caregiving, destruction of life plans, and, yes, financial hardship--on your family and loved ones. This is the fundamental insight underlying a duty to die.

Good thing that Odell and her family didn't have such a crass attitude about those who are dependent on others for their care. Indeed, not that it made a difference to her inherent value and worth as a human being, Odell graduate high school and became a writer and a public speaker.

Her story reminds me of my late good friend Mark O'Brien, stricken by polio at age 6, who spent the rest of his nearly 50 years of life living with the assistance of an iron lung. He graduated UC Berkeley, lived in his own apartment thanks to the independent living movement, and became a journalist and powerful advocate against assisted suicide. The City of Berkeley declared two "Mark O'Brien Days" and he was the subject of the splendid documentary Breathing Lessons.

Too many of us today--particularly among the big-brained set--are ready to write off the profoundly disabled as so much unwanted ballast. But Mark O'Brien and Dianne Odell remind us that we are all equally to be treasured, valued, loved--and if necessary, cared for--as precious brothers and sisters in the human community.

Adult Stem Cells to treat ALS: UBC study

By Alex Schadenberg

A possible breakthrough treatment for people with ALS is being developed at the University of British Columbia (UBC) by Dr. Neil Cashman with results being published in the journal, Muscle & Nerve.
http://www.exacom.net/firstlibrary/Articles/Ontario%20Issues/Health/Drugs%20and%20bio%20research/Adult%20Stem%20Cells%20to%20treat%20ALS.htm

The pilot study has established a safe pathway for using bone-marrow stem cells to slow down and potentially treat ALS.

The study tested the use of a growth factor stimulant in ALS patients and found that bone-marrow stem cells became activated with no adverse effects to the patients.

Cashman stated that "This pathway, if one day successful, may provide a new therapy that will avoid the ethical debate surrounding embryonic stem cells"

The researchers have found that Granulocyte Colony Stimulating Factor (G-CSF) is the safest growth factor to use for ALS patients.

Cashman said that "There have been many misgivings in using stem cell stimulators in ALS patients but now we know we can safely do this. This is an important first step in providing a new treatment for ALS."

This is one more example of the many therapies that are being derived from ethical adult stem cells. Embryonic stem cells continue to have no successful applications and they remain an ethical mine field

Weighing in on Initiative 1000

By Bobby Schindler

Columnist Joel Connelly chimes in again regarding the state of Washington's effort (Initiative 1000) to legalize physician assisted suicide. You can read his previous column and Wesley's remarks.

Connelly exposes the overwhelming disparity as far as the money raised from both sides. From the article:

As of the latest reports, however, the pro-Initiative 1000 campaign has raised $950,000. The Committee Against Assisted Suicide has collected just $61,000. The bulk of the pro-I-1000 war chest comes from out of state. The biggest bucks have flowed from five "Compassion in Choices" committees across the country ($117,100), the Euthanasia Research and Guidance Organization ($3,500), the Oregon Death With Dignity PAC ($315,000), the Death with Dignity National Center ($15,000) and a group called the Final Exit Network of Georgia ($1,000).

Then there is the question of the so called safeguards when it comes to allowing this practice.

What issues should citizens take to mind? Safeguards in the Oregon law are a place to begin. The Oregon law contains no requirement to notify the family of a patient requesting aid in taking his or her life. Nor does it require that a patient receive mental health counseling.

"The law is written so you just have to be within six months of dying: You do not have to be suffering and you don't have to have psychiatric assistance," said Hendin.

In a University of Michigan Law Review article, Hendin and Dr. Kathleen Foley, a professor at the Cornell University medical college, use a half-dozen cases to challenge Oregon's safeguards. They argue elderly patients have been pressured to die.

Connelly does go on to give equal time to the other side of the argument regarding safeguards. Nevertheless, it looks like we will know soon if Initiative 1000 will be on the ballot this November in the state of Washington.

Scientific Structures: Dominence and Strength

By Jennifer Lahl

My colleague, Evan Rosa, has a great piece here on the recent approval of the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) to award $271 million dollars in facilities grants to 12 academic and research institutions. 800,000 square feet of buildings to be erected by 2010 for the purpose of embryonic stem cell and human cloning research funded by the California taxpayers.
10 of the 12 buildings will be on university campuses. Like the University of California, Berkeley's Li Ka Shing Center for Biomedical and Health Sciences, which will boast 60,000 square-feet and 12 labs dedicated to embryonic stem cell research.

Rosa writes, "Structures are suggestive . And these buildings, bought on the Prop 71 budget, suggest something radical: academic, political and cultural approval of (human) embryonic stem cell research. They are monuments—monoliths even—of scientific dominance and strength.

Even Robert Klein, chairman of CIRM's governing agency , agrees, "This Prop 71 stem cell research facilities program is one of the largest building programs ever dedicated for a new field of medical science and it will deliver an impact that will be felt worldwide."

Consider this final thought: Klein also responds to the May 7, 2008, hESC research facilities decision that "[California research institutions'] incredible commitment [of funding] underscores the promise that stem cell research holds for patients suffering from chronic disease and injury."

There's that word again. Promise . For such a politically skeptical culture—people so wary of the easy words of our would-be leaders—we sure have exhibited a lot of faith in the "promise" scientists and politicians are making for human embryos. We're betting $271 million (and who knows how many human lives?) on that promise this month, and by 2010 and beyond we'll see how these structures stack up: memorials or mausoleums?"

Suicide Tourists dying in Switzerland

By Alex Schadenberg

The Dignitas suicide clinic in Switzerland helped to kill 335 suicidal people in the past two years with 85 percent of them being foreigners.

Ludwig Minelli, the director of the Dignitas suicide clinic in Zurich has recently released his statistics on the number of deaths at the Dignitias clinic.
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article1216810.ece

The Dignitas clinic admits to charging approximately 5000 British pounds (approximately $10,000) to assist the suicide of their clients. One must first pay a membership fee to Dignitas before they will consider assisting a persons suicide. Of course it has nothing to do with money.

Minelli stated that 50 percent of the deaths are German suicide tourists with the British and the French making up the next two most common nationalities to die at the clinic.

Dignitas has been involved with suicides in vans, similar to the acts by Dr. Kevorkian, and they currently employ the plastic bag and helium method. They began the bag and helium method to avoid the need to receive approval from a physician who would write the lethal prescription.

Recently the Swiss court approved a case of assisting a suicide of a person who was chronically depressed and not physically dying.

Previous comments by Wesley
http://www.wesleyjsmith.com/blog/2007/04/dignitas-to-finish-hate-crime-with.html

http://discardedlies.com/entry/?15281_

Doctors in Switzerland have compared the methods used by Dignitas to those that were used by the Nazi’s.

Some say that this is not a fair comparison because the Nazi’s weren’t concerned about the choice of the victim, but since when have depressed and suicidal people freely chose death.

It is imperative that countries support suicide prevention strategies for their most vulnerable citizens whom Minelli and his Dignitas team are preying on.

We must recognize that a caring society protects its vulnerable citizens at their greatest time of need.

Japanese government intends to reduce suicide rate

By Alex Schadenberg
euthanasiaprevention@on.aibn.com

Japan is reviewing its guidelines aimed at reducing the number of suicides in Japan and hopes to reduce the suicide rate by 20 percent by 2016.http://www.bloomberg.com:80/apps/news?pid=20601101&sid=a_2Lhi9MAfY0&refer=japan

Japan has been plagued by more than 30,000 suicide deaths each year over the past 10 years. According to the United Nations they have the 9th highest suicide rate in the world.

Recently the Japanese government asked internet providers to block websites that promote suicide and suicide methods, such as hydrogen sulphide on the internet after their was a rash of suicides committed using these techniques in the past few months. http://alexschadenberg.blogspot.com/2008/05/internet-providers-urged-to-remove.html

Chief Cabinet Secretary Nobutaka Machimura said "It's outrageous that something that seems to promote suicide is widely available on the Internet. There is freedom of expression but it must be accompanied by responsibility. These things shouldn't go unregulated."

The Australian government passed a law prohibiting the promotion and counseling of suicide on the internet a few years ago in response to the work of Dr. Philip Nitschke, the Australian Dr. Death, who was providing suicide and counseling people to commit suicide via the internet.

All western nations need laws that protect vulnerable depressed and mentally incompetent people from falling victim to the euthanasia lobby who are promoting suicide (right to die) as a human right.

Seeking Person Status for Chimpanzee

Matthew Hiasl Pan is the name given to him. Nice name except for one major detail. Pan is a 26 year old Chimpanzee. And in the radical animal rights activists mind Pan should be seen as, treated as and protected in law as a person.

Thankfully the high court in Austria decided that only people get people status. Duh! The only agreement with the animal rights activists is that Pan is not a human. But the claim is, if you get to know Pan, you will realize that he is a person.

Not happy with the Austrian decision, they've taken their case to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France.

Wesley has said, "giving constitutional rights to animals and plants will open Pandora’s Box.
“Chimp personhood is a primary goal that animal-right activists seek to attain and then use as a wrecking ball to disintegrate human exceptionalism,” Smith also said “Once a court declares a chimpanzee to be a full person, that ruling would make chimps, in at least some regards, our legal equals. … And when it happens … it will be a moral earthquake that will harm humankind profoundly.”

No one at Secondhand Smoke would say that animals should not be treated with respect and treated humanely, however, if it looks like a chimp, acts like a chimp, sounds like a chimp, it must be a chimp! And not a person.

More on the Dr. "Infanticide" Sewerling Disgrace

I am glad Alex decided to write on the award given to Dr. Hans-Joachim Sewering--a Holocaust doctor!--by a German medical association. A friend of mine, the Nazi hunter Dr. Bill Franzblau, helped bust Sewering years ago--leading to the bad doctor's having to quit as head of the World Medical Association. Indicating his mindset, Sewerling claimed at the time that it was all a Jewish conspiracy!

Now, he gets an award. But should we be surprised? Infanticide is positively in these days. Proponents get to teach at Princeton and pro infanticide pieces have run in the NEJM, the NYT, and the Hastings Center Report--as documented here at SHS. The way things are going, the doctors hanged for such practices after Nuremberg will be issued an apology by the oh-so-compassionate big brained folk pushing the New Eugenics Agenda!

Families encouraged to let unresponsive loved ones die

By Alex Schadenberg

The recent Australian guidelines on withdrawing medical treatment from people in a "unresponsive" state will not only encourage families to withdraw medical treatment from their family members but also to deny them basic care provisions. http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,23755540-952,00.html

The guidelines will encourage families to withdraw basic care such as tube feeding from their "unresponsive" loved one’s. When tube feeding is withdrawn from a person who is cognitively disabled and appears unresponsive, but who is not otherwise dying or nearing death, then the cause of death will be death by dehydration, or in other-words death by euthanasia by omission.

It should be considered optional to withdraw or withhold medical treatment that is risky, intrusive, destructive, exhausting, painful or repugnant or when the cost outweighs benefit or success, or when the treatment is literally futile.

But, medical care such as the provision of fluids and food by tube should be considered obligatory so long as the patient is physiologically benefitting from the care or until the person is imminently dying.

In order for everyone to be treated as an equal citizen, society needs to recognize the dignity of each human being, even when they: live with permanent physical or cognitive disabilities and unable to effectively communicate with others.

The new Australian guidelines encourage physicians and family members to treat people who are patients in post-coma unresponsiveness (PCU) and a minimally responsive state (MRS) differently than other people.

I think that this is a huge step towards future policies that will include the elimination of people with cognitive disabilities who will already be treated without equality and already viewed as expendable.

Toward Honest Talk

By Alex Schadenberg

I read an excellent article by Marilyn Golden in the Capitol Weekly online explaining why California's Bill AB 2747 that is sponsored by Patti Berg needs to be defeated.

Marilyn Golden is a Policy Analyst at the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund (DREDF) which is the leading center on policy and law in relation to disability rights in the U.S.

Golden effectively explains how AB 2747 represents a change in strategy for the euthanasia lobby group compassion and choices (C & C). C & C have made several attempts to legalize assisted suicide since 2005.

Bill AB 2747 is designed to pave the way for the legalization of assisted suicide in California.

As a point of interest, there is a similar bill in Vermont that is also being sponsored by the euthanasia lobby groups.

Read Bobby Schindler's comment to follow mine to get a more complete picture.

More on AB 2747

By Bobby Schindler

Here is more on California Bill AB 2747 by disability rights advocate Marilyn Golden. Thankfully, this bill, which is being sponsored by California Assemblymembers Patty Berg and Lloyd Levine is being exposed for what it really is, a backdoor attempt to legalize physician assisted suicide. From the article:

"This bill represents a change in strategy by Compassion and Choices after three years of defeat. Every year since 2005, the group tried to legalize assisted suicide in California. Each year, strong bi-partisan opposition defeated that legislation. On a new tack, this bill would pave the way for their hoped-for future legalization of assisted suicide."

Wesley has also written about the potential dangers of this bill and here Marilyn Golden does the same.

"AB 2747 would mandate that doctors discuss with patients still a year from death, unusual end-of-life courses of action including voluntarily starving and dehydrating themselves, which is not even a medical treatment."

This bill would also define terminal illness as one year to live.

"To mandate this discussion a year in advance of death is shockingly early. It is not unusual for a 'terminal' patient to dramatically outlive her terminal prognosis by many years. To force such a discussion on a patient at that time is not fair to the patient. One must ask what end is served by this timing."

Hopefully, this bill will fail for what it is - a cowardly and dishonest attempt to legalize doctor assisted suicide.

Nazi doctor wins medical award

By Alex Schadenberg

Dr. Hans-Joachim Sewering, a 92-year-old german physician has been honored for performing unequalled service in the cause of freedom of the practice and the independence of the medical profession, and to the nation’s health system by the German Federation of Internal Medicine.
http://www.canada.com/calgaryherald/news/story.html?id=267a801e-2b52-42d7-b06e-1d27f3dabf24

The Anti-Defamation League in the U.S. claims that Sewering sent up to 900 children to their death at a euthanasia centre. Sewering has admitted being a member of the SS, but he has denied being responsible for euthanasia deaths.

These cases are very important because they remind us that people are capable of doing horrific acts to other human beings.

Society likes to believe that these horrific acts only happened because of the Nazi regime that controlled Germany, but the reality is that Hitler wasn’t ordering these deaths, physicians were ordering these deaths. Hitler only gave them permission.

Whether Sewering is partly responsible for 900 deaths or not, it is clear that in the long-term, the primary victims of euthanasia will be people with disabilities and other vulnerable persons who will either be subtly coerced into accepting death or killed out of indifference.

People who lack equality, also will lack the necessary ability to effectively resist the culture of death.

Fun in the Baltic

Ystad, Sweden: A really pretty town on the Southern Coast. Relaxation commenced.










Sunrise this morning over the Baltic off the coast of Germany.

Warning Against the Fundamentalists of Scientism

I have long warned that some are attempting to turn science from a method of obtaining and applying knowledge, into a belief system known as scientism. I am not the only one who has noticed. From a column about debate tactics employed before a recent vote in the House of Commons to permit human/animal cloned hybrids and designer children, "Beware Scientists Who Think They Know Everything," published in the UK's Daily Mail:

Huge issues are being debated, deep emotions are involved and firmly rooted beliefs are lined up on either side. Indeed, seldom has more tolerance and understanding of contrary views been required.

But instead of tolerance, the debates have been marked by bigotry, zealotry and a refusal to accept that contrary views can have any validity at all. What's more, this gross intolerance has not come from the ranks of politicians, who make a profession of denigrating their opponents, or the religious, who have a rich history of persecuting dissenters.

Shamefully, the worst offenders have been the scientists and their supporters, the very people who make the loudest claims to rationality and of being swayed by facts not fundamentalism.

It's absolutely true. And many of these same propagandists are the most willing to play fast and loose with the facts--as we've often discussed here at SHS.

This is an important issue that needs more attention. Some of the very people who castigate religion are busy creating their own, complete with high priests whose word cannot be gainsaid.

Will Wonders Never Cease?

By Jennifer Lahl

A friend sent me the link to this news story the other day.

In this Culture of Death, I never ceased to be amazed with the miraculous.

This story highlights, yet another person, not quite dead yet, who suddenly and amazingly woke up. Her family said their good byes, and had pulled all of her life supports tubes except for her mechanical ventilation while they had a discussion on donating her organs after she had died.

And she just woke up. And she woke up talking. The video of her is amazing.

Why the rush toward death?

The Big Easy Shows Us How It's Done

By Jennifer Lahl

Louisiana just passed through their Senate committee, HR 370, which if passed, would ban the use of public funds for human cloning research. Hooray! Great model legislation moves forward without opposition and is headed to the Senate floor for a vote. Since its not being resisted, I hope that it passes. It has been unfortunate that human cloning has not been banned at the federal level making the statewide battles fierce and contentious. And what's beautiful about the cooperative efforts in the Louisiana Legislature is their ability to get past the smoke and hype and see that cloning researchers are jumping off the band wagon, therapies are coming to patients through adult, umbilical cord blood and iPS cells which can get around the ethical issues requiring us to create nascent human life just so we can destroy it.

One has to look no further than the Golden State of California. The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) is already doling out big bucks of tax payer dollars for cloning researchers to conduct research that has yet to produce one therapy for any diseased patient.

In the spirit of Wesley J. Smith, can we all say PORK!

EU Court to Rule if Chimp is "Person!

Can't even take a vacation! But this is very big:

Chimp personhood is a primary goal that animal right activists seek to attain and then use as a wrecking ball to disintegrate human exceptionalism. Once a court's declares a chimpanzee to be a full person, that ruling would make chimps, in at least some regards, our legal equals, which, in turn would erect a new Noah's Ark, only this time shaped like a courtroom, with animal "guardians" soon clogging the courts with suits "by animals" demanding rights.

An early try in Austria toward this end was not successful, as I covered here at SHS. But now the EU Court decided to take that case on appeal--and that ain't good. There was no reason to take the case just to deny what does not, and has never existed. Thus I fear this means that at least some court members are considering making history (to say the least) by finding that under European law chimps are persons and fully entitled to the rights and privileges (but not the duties) thereof. From the story:

Eberhart Theuer, the animal rights group's chief legal adviser, said there is a legal precedent to appoint a guardian for an individual incapable of expressing himself. "As long as Matthew is not recognised as a person, he could be sold abroad or killed for economic reasons," Theuer said.

'His life depends on this decision. This case is about the fundamental question: Who is the bearer of human rights? Who is a person according to the European Human Rights Charter?'

A spokesman for the court in Strasbourg said: "Any application regarding this chimpanzee will be considered at a primary level by a magistrate and a lawyer before we decide whether it deserves a full-blown hearing."

The recent Swiss farce in which individual plants were accorded dignity and social animals now have constitutional rights shows the direction in which powerful elite anti-humanists and the big brained intellectuals are hell bent on taking us. And when it happens--notice I didn't say if--it will be a moral earthquake that will harm humankind profoundly, starting with the weakest among us, but eventually reaching all of us. Can you spell Pandora's box?

54 ill as new toxic fume suicide hits Japan

By Alex Schadenberg

CNN news has reported about a suicide case in Japan that resulted in 54 people becoming sick from the toxic fumes related to the suicide concoction that was composed of a liquid pesticide.
http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/05/22/toxic.suicide/?iref=hpmostpop

Earlier this month a 24 year old man committed suicide by mixing laundry detergent and cleaning fluids.

In April, a 14 year old girl used the same method to commit suicide, resulting in 90 neighbors becoming sick from the toxic fumes.

CNN reported that:
"The suicides are seen as part of a spate of detergent-related deaths that experts say have been encouraged by Internet suicide sites since last summer.
Seiji Yoshikawa, deputy head of the Internet Hot Line, which operates under the guidelines of police, said the number of sites promoting detergent suicides soared in April.
"They are rife on the Internet. Writing examples include 'you can die easily and beautifully' and 'this is much easier than charcoal-burning suicide,'" Yoshikawa said, referring to a once-popular suicide method, The Associated Press reported.'

On May 1, I reported about a call for internet providers in Japan to block access to suicide websites in relation to the surge in suicides in Japan.
http://alexschadenberg.blogspot.com/2008/05/internet-providers-urged-to-remove.html

Governments on a world-wide basis need to enact laws to shut down websites that promote and counsel people to commit suicide in order to protect the vulnerable depressed and mentally ill people who are using these websites.

Websites that promote child pornography are effectively being shut down due to laws that have been enacted to protect children. In the same way we need to shut down websites that promote suicide.

Dr. Philip Nitschke, Australia’s Dr. Death and the visible leader of the Right to Die lobby in Australia, has been involved in suicide counseling via the internet for many years. The Right to Die is not about dignity with dignity, it is about creating a universal "right to die".
http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewForeignBureaus.asp?Page=/ForeignBureaus/archive/200609/INT20060912a.html

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,23633391-2,00.html

Obsessed with Death

By Bobby Schindler

I found this article very interesting, or should I say pathetic?

Philip Nitschke recently appeared as a witness in a euthanasia trial. Evidently, the prosecutor claimed that he was "hell-bent" on helping a man to commit assisted suicide despite the fact that he suffered from severe Alzheimer's. Of course Nitschke denied the accusation and also that he had a "reckless disregard for human life" or that he "abrogated" his responsibilities as a doctor.

However, listen to Nitschke's response when asked how he determines whether or not a person has the mental faculties to decide to commit suicide.

"It was 'an impression one forms after discussion'. If they can consistently, and repeatedly and coherently put a position that this is what they want ... "

So let get this right, a man with severe Alzheimer's has the mental capacity to "repeatedly" and "coherently" communicate that he wants to kill himself.

No reckless disregard for human life there.

SHS Funnies

Lio runs into a little "plant dignity:"

Crazy Brave New Britain

By Jennifer Lahl

Monday, as was expected, the United Kingdom approved the creation of human-animal hybrids for research. British officials have bought it hook line and sinker . . . they want to maintain their reputation as leaders in stem cell research. And since a strong contingent of organized groups have been successful at slowing down the human egg trade, creating a shortage of human eggs for research, the researchers are moving forward using enucleated animal eggs and adding in human genetic material, typically from a skin cell. Add a small jolt of electricity and Voila! The cybrid is here. Interspecies cloning has occurred.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown said, “these embryos would bring to an end 'the critical limiting factor in stem cell research: the lack of human eggs from which to create embryos and collect stem cells'. They would also bring new cures and treatments to millions of people.”

The bill also backs the creation of “savior siblings”. This means, if you have a sick child who needs a genetic match, you can make embryos in the lab through IVF technology, test them to identify the match, and then implant that embryo in order to save your sick child. Of course, this also means, generally the other embryos are either discarded or donated for research. Perhaps some of you have read Jodi Picoult’s book, My Sister’s Keeper? Chilling what happens when we treat people as means to an end.

And no new law would be complete without either a Hollywood celebrity with an illness or a politician with a sick child or relative beating the desperate drum of Cures, Cures, Cures.

May cool heads prevail as it looks as if we will stop at nothing?

DNA Fingerprinting Identifies Viable IVF Embryos

By Jennifer Lahl

Has the era of high tech embryo profiling arrived? I have been following the recent study published in the journal Human Reproduction. Researchers have combined the technology that allows them to screen embryos at the blastocyst stage with the DNA fingerprinting and microarray analysis technology in order to identify the viable blastocysts transferred into the mother. The search for the best embryo has always been part of the IVF equation with all the quality controls put in place in the lab.

So how is the research being conducted?

“The researchers tested the DNA of early in vitro fertilization embryos before implanting them into the womb, and then compared the results with the DNA of the healthy babies that were born, and found a cluster of genes that could be used to establish which embryos are likely to make it to full term.”

And why is this research touted as progress?

“The idea is that by using objective, measurable criteria rather than the current more subjective observations such as looking at the morphology of the blastocysts, the ability to predict which embryos are viable will improve to such an extent that IVF clinicians will be able to confidently implant single embryos without reducing pregnancy rates.”

Current methods of embryo testing and embryo grading occur daily in IVF clinics and are just part of the routine. I’ve always criticized embryo grading for being subjective, harmful and dangerous to the early embryo as well as just not a good indicator of the future health of the baby. We’re in dangerous waters here.

The timeline keeps getting moved back further and further in human development in our insatiable quest for the perfect people. We’ve become a people with zero tolerance with anything less than perfect.

Alleged suicide job shocks campaigners

By Alex Schadenberg

A New Zealand news agency is suggesting that leaders on both sides of the euthanasia debate are surprised that an American woman using the name Susan Wilson was paid $12,000to fly to New Zealand and assist the death of a woman suffering from depression. http://tvnz.co.nz/view/page/1786504

As the long-time leader of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition in Canada and now the International chair, I am neither surprised or shocked by this news.

In September 2006, I attended the World Federation of Right to Die Societies bi-annual conference in Toronto. During the proceedings of that conference, it was apparent that the end-goal for the euthanasia lobby was the acceptance of the "last-will-pill" or the peaceful pill.

Dr. Rob Jonquiere, the moderate leader of the Right to Die movement in the Netherlands explained that by taking the law in their own hands that activists were making it more difficult for politicians to accept the final goal - the acceptance of the "last-will-pill". When you analyze the concept of a last-will-pill you must agree that there is no way to protect people who are depressed or mentally incompetent from killing themselves with this pill.

We already know that the Supreme Court in the Netherlands approved euthanasia for people who are experiencing chronic depression or chronic mental suffering.

Dr. Philip Nitschke, who is the maverick Australian leader of Exit International promoted the peaceful pill that allegedly could be available to anyone at anytime.

Several years ago Wesley Smith reported comments by Nitschke in an article titled "Noxious Nitschke" stating that the "peaceful pill" could be available to troubled teens. http://www.nationalreview.com/smithw/smith200411150826.asp

The question for the euthanasia lobby is not that they oppose euthanasia or assisted suicide for people who suffer depression, the question is how will the public knowledge of their support for these acts affect their campaign to legalize euthanasia or assisted suicide everywhere?

Finally, if there is nothing wrong with assisted suicide then why should assisting a suicide be done for free. Susan Wilson had to fly to New Zealand and accept the chance that she might be arrested for her actions.

Maybe the real shock is that someone would pay her $12,000 and the other members of the euthanasia lobby feel that they are being under paid.

Pushing Futile Care

I appreciate Wesley asking me to help out while he is vacationing. So here it goes...

Posted by Bobby Schindler

Although I agree with some of what Dr. Fisher says in regard to our failing health care system, his underlying premise about how to fix it should concern us all. The good doctor is clearly promoting the extremely dangerous futile care theory that Wesley often writes about. From the article:

"How death is approached by the medical community has been further complicated by a growing patient-rights movement and an undermining of physicians," he said. "Patients have been given more power to refuse appropriate therapy, and many have interpreted this change to mean that patients also have the right to insist on and receive inappropriate therapy."

Here Dr. Fisher argues why we need futile care.

"We ask families to make the decisions," he said. "We put the onus on the family to decide care. To me, that's a dereliction of duty." "Doctors provide patients with two things -- skills and judgment -- and judgment is by far the more important skill. Judgment comes from seeing hundreds of cases over a course of years," Fisher said. "A physician consults with a family and should present all the rational options. But at some point the doctor has to say when attempts at curative care are no longer a rational choice."

Once again we are seeing a major push from the medical community claiming that doctors should have the power to make final decisions regarding whether or not a patient should be provided care or even allowed continued care once treatment has begun.

One only has to think of Jesse Ramirez and Haleigh Poutre to recognize that giving doctor's full authority on these matters will do little to help "fix" our national health care problems. Unless you are part of the crowd that believes the solution to health care problems is to stop treatment to those who are sick, weak or otherwise vulnerable.

Sex Change Treatment for 7 Year Olds!

This seems to me to be unethical human experimentation: A doctor in Boston gives hormones to children who believe themselves to be transgendered to help prevent puberty and move them toward a sex change. From the story:

Boston's Children's Hospital bills itself as the hospital for children--and now it's also the hospital for children who want a sex change, a procedure some critics are calling "barbaric." Dr. Norman Spack, a pediatric specialist at the hospital, has launched a clinic for transgendered kids--boys who feel like girls, girls who want to be boys-- and he's opening his doors to patients as young as 7. Spack offers his younger patients counseling and drugs that delay the onset of puberty.

The drugs stop the natural flood of hormones that would make it difficult to have a sex alteration later in life, allowing patients more time to decide whether they want to make the change.

Spack also offers some teenagers hormone therapy, a drastic step that changes the way they grow and develop. While the effects of drug treatments can be stopped, long-term hormone therapy can be irreversible, causing permanent infertility in both sexes.

We have no true understanding of the causes of transexualism. We don't know that a kid who is seven and thinks he is a girl will still feel that way when he is 20. He might. Some transexuals report having those feelings very early. But we don't know how many people there might be who felt that way at 7 but don't at 20.

Worse, to medically intervene with strong hormones--the long term impact on the child's body and mental state we cannot know--when there is no underlying physical disease requiring the treatment, is to me, abuse. What if it causes cancer in 20 years? What if it impacts on the children of these children? What if the hormones impact their emotional and mental states, perhaps influencing their transexuality? We can't know the answers. All of this is just too new.

I am reminded of "Ashley's treatment," in which a profoundly disabled girl's normal physical development was interfered with through surgery and hormones to allow better ease of care. Caring motives notwithstanding, that was wrong, at least without a court order, as the hospital so admitted.

And now this: According to the story the Europeans are already traveling this path. And of course, NPR has come out with a properly nonjudgmental feature story:

The hormone blockers are the first stage of the treatment, but there's a second stage that's possible. Once children have postponed puberty for three or four years, at around age 16 they can choose to begin maturing sexually into the opposite gender, the gender they want to become. To do this, they begin taking the hormones of the opposite sex. For males, taking estrogen at this point will bring on breast and hip growth--and all the attributes physical and emotional of females. The reverse will happen for girls who take testosterone. Spack says this treatment can help make an adult transgender male almost indistinguishable from a biological male in terms of physical appearance. "We can make it possible that they can fit in in the way they want to. It is really quite amazing," he says.

This is unconscionable and reflects how sick our culture is becoming--and I am not referring to transgendered people. The inability or unwillingness by a growing number of us to make any judgments that might be criticized as moralism--lest one be denigrated as a bigot, premodern, or a hypocrite--has created a moral vacuum in which very little remains out of bounds. And the worst part is that the greatest victims in the ongoing and utter collapse of norms are our children.

Bon Voyage! SHS Taking a Cruise

Secondhand Smokette is frazzled, I am about to double down on the gray matter and make my final push to finish the animal rights book this summer, and her parents are itching to travel: So we are taking a cruise.

I just had the Geek Squad tune up the old laptop, so I will still be posting from time-to-time. I am, after all, utterly obsessive and retentive. But I thought I would also invite some pals to guest post. They are:

Jennifer Lahl: Jennifer is the founder and head of the Center for Bioethics and Culture. Her primary focus is biotechnology, although the CBC hits all of the issues we address here at SHS.



Bobby Schindler:In the wake of his sister Terri Schiavo's death, Bobby became a righteous voice speaking up for the intrinsic dignity of the lives of people with disabilities and against medical discrimination.



Alex Schadenberg: Alex is the indomitable founder and head of the Canadian anti assisted suicide organization the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition.


I look forward to their thoughts, and may even comment on what they say myself. Whether you agree or disagree with what they write, please give them a warm welcome.

All ashore that's going ashore!

Animal Rights versus Environmentalism

I have noticed a slowly growing schism between animal rights and environmentalism. The former cares about each animal as individuals, perceiving their moral value (whether based on "painience" or "sentience") to that generally accorded to human beings. Environmentalism, in contrast, cares about macro systems, a view in which individuals--perhaps even human beings--matter less and in the more radical view, can even be sacrificed to "save the planet."

This sometimes leads the two to come into conflict, as I have pointed out here. Now, animal rights activists are threatening to stop a planned kangaroo cull that is being done to protect endangered grass and grasshoppers. (But grasshoppers are animals, and accordingly, PETA has called for the end of insect exploitation such as domesticated queen bee "rape racks.") But I digress. From the story:

ANIMAL liberationists are threatening to act as human shields to prevent a kangaroo cull on military land. Killing pens and refrigerated trucks were in place yesterday at a former navy transmission station in Canberra, ahead of the planned culling of about 400 kangaroos over the next few days. The cull will be carried out to protect rare grasslands and plants and the threatened perunga grasshopper and golden sun moth. The kangaroos will be stunned with tranquilliser darts and then given lethal injections. The cull has earned the ire of international vegetarian group Viva! (Vegetarians International Voice for Animals) and its celebrity backers, including Sir Paul McCartney.

Sigh. I just wish McCartney's moral sense were as prodigious as his musical talent.

SHS Funnies

A transhumanist's guide to friendship:

ESCR Arguments in the UK: "Beware False Promises"

The UK is debating a new embryo bill that would, among other things, explicitly permit the creation of human/animal cloned hybrid embryos for use in research. And even though there is no attempt in the UK to outlaw human ESCR or human cloning using human eggs, Prime Minister Gordon Brown appears on the defensive due to the great successes so far in adult stem cells. From "Beware False Promises," written by the the neuroscientist Neil Scolding:

Dazzled by the promises, the public stands by in awe of the science. The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority allows everything: it has thus far not ultimately rejected a single embryo-research-related application. Pro-embryo-research scientists have a ready mouthpiece in politicians and journalists beguiled by the claims. How could anyone oppose these miraculous cures? What we have seen in the determined efforts of some of the bill's more politically motivated protagonists is a confusion of the issues and a classic sleight of hand--in two separate ways. Both need exposing if people of conscience are to form honestly informed views.

The first is tacitly to allow the exciting advances in adult stem-cell treatments to illustrate the far more speculative therapeutic potential of embryonic stem cells; to use the former to justify the latter. Thus Gordon Brown: "With adult stem cells already being used as treatments for conditions including leukaemia, severe combined immunodeficiency, and heart disease, scientists are already close to the breakthroughs that will allow embryonic stem cells to be used to treat a much wider range of conditions. Medical researchers now believe that stem-cell therapy has the potential to change dramatically the treatment of many other human afflictions: including not only Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's but perhaps also cancer, spinal-cord injuries and muscle damage.

Right out of the Missouri and California playbooks: Sure there have been some successes in asult, but that means embryonic will be even better! Classic.

Scolding points out some other truths:

Adult stem cells, present in most if not all specialised organs, have evolved as cells for repair: that is their purpose, and they successfully achieve this in many ways. But all this is barely relevant to the new bill. For here lies the second sleight of hand. The debate has, falsely, been turned into a referendum on all embryonic stem-cell research. What is proposed is actually "only" the licensing of various forms of mixed animal-human embryos as possible new sources of stem cells. But all the justifications for experiments using cybrids (embryos that are largely human but contain a minute quantity of animal material) are based on the falsehood that they are vital for developing embryonic stem-cell-based cures for dreadful diseases as argued by Lord Patel and Gordon Brown...And the suggestion that there is "no alternative" to cybrids is not even close to the truth. Rather, clinical scientists around the world have been extraordinarily excited by the emergence in the last year of a new technique for producing so-called "inducible pluripotent stem cells" (IPSCs).

Never mind that ESCR still can't be used in humans. And never mind that human cloning remains very rudimentary, or that ISPCs look to do most of what you could get from human cloning research, or that health care systems to treat today's sick are terribly strained or in meltdown--the politicians, Science Establishment, and media demand ethics and financial blank checks. This results in a new Gilded Age and little accountability, as in CA, where the CIRM is pouring hundreds of millions into fancy buildings rather than research.

Support for bioscience has become religion. Facts don't matter. What counts is belief.

CPR Usually Not Futile--Even in Terminal Illnesses

This is interesting, considering the drive to refuse wanted CPR as "futile" when people are terminally ill. From a study published in the Journal of Hospice and Palliative Nursing--Vol. 10, No. 3, May/June 2008 (no link available):

There is little evidence CPR is not effective and--hence inappropriate--in end-stage disease. The strongest evidence appears for cancer patients in critical care who experience cardiac arrest as a consequence of multisystem organ failure. This population would meet criteria for not initiating CPR.

However, decisions about the appropriateness of CPR encompass more than quantitative survival. A qualitative approach that addresses benefit from a broader goal-directed perspective must be considered. Benefit of CPR, to some extent, is in the eye of the beholder.

Yes indeed. And that is why coercion in these matters is wrong. But with proper education, a better choice might be made. Thus the article urges a properly detailed discussion of whether to request CPR:

Before the Patient Self-Determination Act (PSDA), goals and decision making were often framed from a medical perspective. Since the enactment of the PSDA, patient-centered goals and decision making take precedence; however, healthcare providers have a responsibility to provide the medical information necessary to make an informed decision about CPR and make professional recommendations...However, large-scale studies of seriously ill adults have demonstrated that CPR discussions are often late and/or lacking. CPR in end-stage disease may not be inappropriate; however,the current practice of making CPR a routine part of the dying process without timely dialogue is very inappropriate.

Educate. Persuade. Cajole, even: But do not force. This is the best way to obtain the most beneficial outcomes for the most patients while maintaining the people's trust in the integrity and beneficence of medicine.

HT: Heather Seierstad

Patti Berg: Calling It as it Isn't

For years, California Assemblywoman Patti Berg (D- Mill Valley) has resorted to every conceivable maneuver she could think of to pass an assisted suicide bill through the California Legislature. She failed. So now, she is trying a different approach: Under the guise of requiring doctors to disclose "information" about "options" available to the "terminally ill," with AB 2747, which I wrote about here (before amendments) and here, she is undermining proper understandings of legitimate medical treatments such as palliative sedation, and attempting to turn it into a form of death on demand.

She's having trouble with this one too and in response, has now penned an "I'm so courageous and my opponents are just death-denying squeamish nervous Nellies who can't handle the truth," kind of column. She writes:

I'm not someone who speaks in euphemisms, either. When I talk about taxes, I talk about taxes. When I talk about sex, I talk about sex. And when I talk about death, I talk about death--I don’t couch real ideas behind fuzzy comfort phrases like "passing on," "going to sleep" or "ceasing to be."

I almost swallowed my Adam's apple when I read that one. I have had to deal with Berg's advocacy for years, and she is the master of using gooey euphemisms when it comes to assisted suicide. For example,I debated her in the pages of the San Francisco Chronicle, and she called assisted suicide "a gentle, voluntary and peaceful choice." Yea, that's straight talk alright. And how about the title of her assisted suicide legalization bill: "The California Compassionate Choices Act." Move over John McCain: Berg is has taken over the steering wheel of the Straight Talk Express!

And how about this nonsense:

In the real world, death is most often a process, predictable and inevitable. Terminal diseases move through phases. Death comes. It is often very cruel. The agony of cancer does not make for pleasant conversation.

Except, when you have defined terminal illness as one year to live--as AB 2747 does--it is not at all predictable. My first hospice patient that I served as a volunteer got kicked out because he improved to the point he wasn't dying. My last patient, a man with ALS, was supposed to die in 6 months and lasted nearly 2 years. A friend of mine was given 3 months to live with lung cancer--more than 7 years ago! I am sure you all have similar stories. Contrary to Berg, we usually don't die by the numbers until we get very close to the end.

And indeed, while cancer is certainly not pleasant to discuss, the pain it causes is almost always amenable to palliation--to the point that when Dame Cecily Saunders, the founder of the modern hospice movement, was once asked by the New York Times how she wanted to die, she said cancer! This even nonplussed me, but she had an interesting reason: She knew her suffering could be controlled and it would give her time to say goodbye to her friends. (Saunders got her wish. She died of cancer in her own hospice, Here is the obituary that I wrote about her for the Weekly Standard.)

The "courageous truth teller" Berg's problem is that we understand her all too well. She has an ideologue's zeal for assisted suicide. That is her right. But pretending that our side hasn't the stomach to talk frankly about death is ludicrous. Indeed, getting her side to talk plainly about what they propose and its consequences is the primary problem.

More Commentary on Swiss Nonsense

I did a lot of media on my "Silent Scream of the Asparagus" piece in the Weekly Standard. But I am certainly not alone in noticing the extremes to which the Swiss are now going, not only with plant "dignity," but also with certain "rights" for social animals--including goldfish--about which I also commented here at SHS. And now Michael Cook, the creator of the splendid bioethics news clearing house BioEge, has weighed in with "The Dignity of Swiss Goldfish." From his column:

Switzerland's passion for the dignity of all creatures great and small, however, rings hollow in view of its treatment of human beings. It is one of the few countries in the world where assisted suicide is legal. The best-known agency for DIY [do it yourself] euthanasia, a Zurich-based group called--what else?--Dignitas, recently opened its thanatorium in the same building as Switzerland's biggest legal brothel. Surely that violates one of the numerous provisions in the constitution guaranteeing human dignity. As it is now, there seems to be about as much bureaucracy involved in killing a Swiss goldfish as there is in killing a human being. (Special chemicals are required since flushing fish down the toilet has been deemed undignified.) The poor, befuddled Swiss have clearly lost the plot on what dignity is and who is entitled to it.

Cook notes that human dignity--and whether it is important--is now an issue of controversy (as we also discussed here when I revealed the shallowness of Steven Pinker's tirade against human dignity as meaningful in bioethics). Cook writes:

Well, the Swiss folderol suggests we will all be very sorry when "human dignity" is eliminated. The scope of human dignity in Switzerland has shrunk to the point that international death tourism there has become a boutique business. At the same time, the scope of non-human dignity has expanded. This is to be expected. For years the radical fringe of animal rights activists has attacked violence against animals by using violence against humans.

What is unexpected is that there seems to be no brake on the ever-expanding circle of non-human dignity. Somewhere above spiders and slugs, perhaps. But the Swiss experience suggests otherwise. Once the DNA of human dignity has been tampered with, it keeps expanding by some crazy logic, unfettered by common sense, until it includes plants, and even "other organisms".

Precisely. Defining ourselves down to roughly the moral value of flora and fauna is not good for the human race. Nor, in the end, will it be good for flora and fauna.

Utilitarian Bioethics: Anything Goes on One End, Instrumentalization of the Weak on the Other

John Harris is an influential UK bioethicist whose hard core utilitarianism makes his ideas dangerous and potentially as tyrannical as those of Peter Singer--perhaps more. I first became aware of Harris when researching Culture of Death: The Assault on Medical Ethics in America, when I read an article he wrote in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal called "The Concept of the Person and the Value of Life," in which he wrote:

Many, if not most of the problems of health care ethics presuppose that we have a view about what sorts of beings have something we might think of as ultimate moral value. Or, if this sounds to apocalyptic then we certainly need to identify the sorts of individuals who have "the highest" moral value or importance...

Harris's point was that human nonpersons can be killed and we can get a good night's sleep. But imagine if he had said we need to identify the race that has the highest moral value and that another race could be killed. He would be rightly labeled a bigot. This is the same thing, just different victims.

As we all know by now, such invidious discrimination against the weak and vulnerable is accepted widely in the Establishment--and even in the media despite their bleating about liberalism and human equality. These attitudes--which are being inculcated into our doctors of tomorrow, our nurses of tomorrow, our government leaders of tomorrow in the elite universities--mark an unapologetic return of eugenics. Indeed, Harris has explicitly supported eugenics, for example, in a BBC report about the pressure on families to eugenically abort:"

"Eugenics is the attempt to create fine healthy children and that's everyone's ambition." He believes couples who choose to have babies even when there are problems are "misguided" and the more we can screen out disability, pain and suffering the better. "We're not trying to do this through killing people or eliminating individuals, we're trying to do this by making choices about which people will exist in the future."

Except those "choices" involve killing people whilst non persons. Indeed, eugenic infanticide or "post birth abortion" as it has been called, is now a regular practice in the Netherlands.

Today, the Times of London has a Harris piece in support of transhumanism (although he doesn't use the term), toward which these eugenic agendas point. He writes:

Darwinian evolution has taken millions of years to create human beings; the next phase of evolution, a phase I call "enhancement evolution", [me: really, intelligent design]could occur before the end of the century. The result may be the emergence of a new species that will initially live alongside us and eventually may entirely replace humankind...

Some of these possibilities are so radical that the creatures benefiting from them would no longer be "human", in the way we think of it. The end of humanity then is not in itself a concern [me:!!!]; making sure that those who replace us are better than we are is a huge and timely concern.

To get there, of course, will require an "anything goes" biotechnological research agenda, including cloning, genetic engineering, and as utilitarian bioethicists have written elsewhere (and I have covered here at SHS), treating human non persons as crops and prize herds in organ procurement and experimentation. It will also include the investment of tremendous sums--this at a time when children with malaria die in Africa and we are banned from using DDT to kill the disease-carrying mosquitoes.

Here we find the other end of the new eugenics, the drive to create the superman that is fueled by eliminating and exploiting the weakest and most vulnerable among us. And, due to the expense, it would be reserved for those with money to burn. Oh, Harris throws a bromide that society should help the deserving poor enhance, but make no mistake about it, in a world in which utilitarian ethics dominate, it would be open season on those deemed to be a drag on society due to their "poor" quality of life. And we can kiss universal human rights goodbye.

Anti Transhumanist Wisdom on Battlestar Gallactica

In Marshall McLuhan's vast television wasteland that is getting vaster and more wasted with each passing year, there are a few shining examples of true excellence. Perhaps the best show on television today--and one of the best ever--is Battlestar Gallactica, a program that like the best science fiction explores the most meaningful issues of human existence and societal complexity.

For those who don't know: the premise of the show is that human beings made millions of robots known as cylons that developed artificial intelligence. The cylons decide to wipe out the human race because of our defects and all but succeed in a suprise nuclear attack.

The last 40,000 humans escape in a ragtag spaceship fleet led by the obsolete war "battlestar" called Gallactica. Eventually, in desperation, the fleet strikes out for their mythical planet of origin--Earth--their enemy hot on their tails.

The cylons were able to infiltrate into human society--and the escaping fleet--because they developed 9 "models" that look and feel human--with the women super hot in order to attract the teenage boy (and middle age man) crowd. What's more, the "human" cylons can't die. If one is killed, it is resurrected, memories intact, in a vat on a resurrection ship: A transhumanist's most devout fantasy! Come to think of it, cylons are transhumanists: They are post human, fully conscious, enhanced, and immortal.

One of the latest twists in the tale has been a civil war breaking out among the cylons, with the rebels now working with the humans. A plan is afoot to destroy the core resurrection ship, meaning that cylons will become mortal, just like us. To sell the plan to a doubting governing council, "Six" one of the cylons, gives a short speech. It struck me that it was worth transcribing and posting here, because shades of Leon Kass, it rebukes the transhumanist fundamental goal of material immortality:

In our civil war, we've seen death. We've watched our people die: Gone forever. As terrible as it was, beyond the reach of the resurrection ship, something began to change.

We could feel a sense of time, as if each moment held its own significance. We began to realize that for our existence to hold any value, it must end. To live meaningful lives, we must die and not return.

The one human flaw that you spend your lifetimes distressing over--mortality--is the one thing; it's the thing that makes you whole.

This is hard but true, isn't it? I know that as I approach my 59th birthday, my focus has certainly sharpened. My father is dead. My grandmother is dead. My mother is almost 91 and my heart trembles. But Six is right. Death's awful shadow gives corporeality its magnificent power. And as we struggle to delay that awful day for ourselves and those we love, death also gives us a reason to grasp the joy and search for transcendence and ultimate meanings--even among those who deny there is any meaning to be found.

Death is important for what it gives us as well as what it takes away. And that is where the transhumanism goes so badly off the rails. There may be an immortal existence, but it isn't--and shouldn't be--here.

Exposing the "War on Science" Bunkum

Advocates for an "anything goes" scientific sector often claim that attempts to place reasonable ethical parameters around biotechnology--say by outlawing all human cloning as has been urged by the UN General Assembly--is a war on science or the imposition of religion. That argument is, and always was, baloney. For example, there are limits on what we can do to animals in research. But those are not based on scientific principles, but rather, on moral precepts. Ditto the limitations on human subjects research. The only reason these two examples aren't similarly attacked is because generally, the Science Establishment agrees with them.

Michael Gerson had a very good piece about this in the Washington Post this week. From his column:

There are few things in American politics more irrationally ideological, more fanatically faith-based, than the accusation that Republicans are conducting a "war on science."

According to Hillary Clinton, the Bush administration has declared "open season on open inquiry." "When I am president," she promises, "scientific integrity will not be the exception; it will be the rule."

The exceptions, in this case, are pretty exceptional: Elias Zerhouni, who has reformed the National Institutes of Health with widely praised efficiency; Anthony Fauci of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who helped set in motion large-scale AIDS treatment in Africa; Francis Collins of the National Human Genome Research Institute, who led the effort to map the human genome. The "war on science" recently has allowed some extraordinary achievements.

For the most part, these accusations are a political ploy -- actually an attempt to shut down political debate. Any practical concern about the content of government sex-education curricula is labeled "anti-science." Any ethical question about the destruction of human embryos to harvest their cells is dismissed as "theological" and thus illegitimate.

Gerson points out that what some call a war on science from the Right, is really a war on human equality from the Left:

In "Science and the Left," his insightful article in the latest issue of the New Atlantis, Yuval Levin argues that a belief in the power of science is central to the development of liberalism--based on the assertion that objective facts and rational planning can replace tradition and religious authority in the organization of society. Levin summarizes the liberal promise this way: "The past was rooted in error and prejudice while the future would have at its disposal a new oracle of genuine truth."

But the oracle of science is silent on certain essential topics. "Science, simply put," says Levin, "cannot account for human equality, and does not offer reasons to believe we are all equal. Science measures our material and animal qualities, and it finds them to be patently unequal."

Without a firm, morally grounded belief in equality, liberalism has been led down some dark paths. The old, progressive eugenics of the late 19th and early 20th centuries involved widespread sterilization of the mentally disabled as a form of social hygiene. "Drastic and Spartan methods may be forced upon society," argued Margaret Sanger in 1922, "if it continues complacently to encourage the chance and chaotic breeding that has resulted from our stupidly cruel sentimentalism."

The consequence as the column notes--and we have pointed out here at SHS repeatedly--leads to the destruction of human exceptionalism (my term) and the methodical advance of the culture of death.

SHS Funnies

The Swiss ethics panel gives an example of violating "animal dignity."




A global warming scientist's prayer the night before his big presentation:

SHS on the Air About "Euphemisms" in Public Advocacy

A radio interview I gave back in 2004 about euphemisms, confusion, and animal rights on the splendid, but now lamentably defunct radio program Issues Etc., was just posted on-line over at Wittenberg Media blog.

I get a bit excited about some scientists not knowing what they are talking about when it comes to ethical issues and cloning. I had forgotten about this but I wrote about it in the Weekly Standard back in early 2004. From that column:

ONE OF THE MORE DISTURBING hallmarks of the cloning debate has been the inaccurate and unscientific language used by cloning proponents to describe human cloning for biomedical research. There is a reason for this disingenuous approach to cloning advocacy. When cloning is accurately described as creating a new human embryo, the public overwhelmingly opposes it--whether the cloning is undertaken for research purposes or to create children. But when obfuscating terminology is employed to make it appear that only "cells" are created in a "therapeutic cloning" procedure, public support tends to grow.

As it turns out, this also holds true for scientists. A new survey of biotechnology researchers has just been released demonstrating both the political effectiveness of the pro-cloning wordplay and an appalling ignorance among the scientific community about what human cloning actually entails.

In that regard, I think it--and the Standard piece--remain timely. It you are interested, check it out.

No Human ESCR Trials per FDA

Geron Corporation has released a series of press releases over several years stating that "next year" it would start the first human trials using ES cells. Apparently, that won't be happening yet. From the story:

The F.D.A. convened a meeting April 10 of expert advisers who stressed the need for stringent safety measures in embryonic stem cell trials.

Steven Bauer, chief of the F.D.A.'s cell and tissue therapy branch, said at the meeting that the agency might require "particularly strong" evidence early in studies that stem cell treatments are effective. The agency may also require longer trials of stem cell therapies than it does for conventional drugs, Mercedes Serabian, a supervisory toxicologist for the agency, said after the meeting.

The company will announce its plans once it receives the F.D.A. letter, Mr. Okarma said. "We are disappointed with this action given the interactions we had with the F.D.A. over four years leading to the filing" of the company's 21,000-page application for the trial, he said.

Tumors are an important worry, as is efficacy. Meanwhile, those adult stem cell advances keep rolling in.

Using the False Claim Act to Impose Futile Care Theory?

Ah, the days when "choice" seemed to be the end all and be all of bioethics. You say you want your profoundly disabled spouse's feeding tube pulled so he dies slowly by dehydration? Choice! You say you want assisted suicide? Choice! You say you want your life extended with life-sustaining treatment? No Choice if the bioethicists believe your life is not worth living!

Wait a minute: That doesn't make sense. Actually, it does. The issue has never really been autonomy. It has been about making sure that certain populations die and stop sucking up resources. If "choice" gets that done, great. Bioethicists love choice. But if not, then they have other ways to ensure that certain people get six feet under.

Toward this end a particularly ham-fisted approach to forcing hospitals to impose medical futility (no choice for hospitals either, apparently) has been proposed over at the Medical Futility Blog. The idea is to use the threat of federal litigation against hospitals who provide too much end of life (EOL) care, and, in the process, turn hospital personnel into informants and litigants against their own employers. From the entry:

Medicare knows, the CBO [Congressional Budget Office] knows, and everyone else knows that Medicare will have to start using some more aggressive CBA [cost benefit analysis] to ration the treatments that it covers. But even before we get to that, it seems that even under current regulations, Medicare should not be paying for much EOL care.

One way that this determination might be made is through the prosecution of a False Claims Act Claim. This could be brought (in New Jersey where there is comparatively more inappropriate EOL care) by the U.S. Attorney, the state AG, or even a private qui tam plaintiff like a nurse who observes too much inappropriate care.

Such coercion will backfire, particularly in an era of strained resources. Whatever trust remains in health care will evaporate. And the ICU or hospital will become scenes of violence as distraught families fight against imposed cessation of life support. Indeed, it has already happened.

This is the consequence of accepting a quality of life ethic. Rather than treating the patient as a person, as Paul Ramsey advocated, it is to treat the sickest and most vulnerable as disposable. And don't think it would stop with medical futility. Once the principle was established that bioethicists could decide who received care and who didn't, the door would open wide to other forms of medical discrimination.

Education works to help patients and families make better EOL choices. But using the club of federal litigation against hospitals that provide "too much care" in order to impose social policy would be undemocratic and tyrannical. Can we spell culture of death?

"Assisted Suicide and the Corruption of Palliative Care"

I have a piece up on today's First Things daily about assisted suicide and how it corrupts palliative care. From my column:

For the past two decades, euthanasia/assisted-suicide ideologues have worked overtime to conflate palliative care--the medical alleviation of pain and other distressing symptoms of serious illness--with intentionally ending the life of the patient. The movement’s first target was the hospice, a specialized form of care for the dying created forty years ago in the United Kingdom by the late, great medical humanitarian Dame Cicely Saunders. Determined to treat what she called the "total pain" of dying patients, Saunders' great innovation was to bring a multidisciplinary team to the task of ensuring that their physical pain, existential suffering, spiritual needs, and mental health are all properly attended.

Saunders believed that suicide prevention, when needed, is an essential part of the package, crucial to fulfilling a hospice's call to value the lives and intrinsic dignity of each patient until the moment of natural death...But assisted-suicide advocates wish to transform hospice into "hemlock" (as one advocate once put it), a facilitator of suicide rather than a preventer.

I note that assisted suicide make much of the fact that about 86% of Oregon assisted suicides were of patients in hospice, and argue that means more is needed to assure a "good death." I see it differently:

But there is another way to look at it. What advocates don't mention--and this is an issue about which the state bureaucrats seem utterly indifferent--is that most of Oregon's assisted suicides were facilitated in some way by people affiliated with the assisted-suicide advocacy group Compassion and Choices (formerly the Hemlock Society)... This means that the patients in the hospice who committed assisted suicide under Oregon's law most likely did not receive suicide prevention--either because the hospice team was not alerted to their patient's suicidal desire or perhaps the Oregon law has effectively short-circuited the prevention response by hospice professionals. In other words, rather than showing the need to expand hospice "services," Oregon demonstrates how assisted suicide actually interferes with the proper delivery of hospice services--at least as the hospice was envisioned by Saunders.

The discussion then turns to the attempts, discussed here previously at SHS, to subvert palliative sedation into backdoor assisted suicide, with particular attention to the California bill I have mentioned previously:

The effect of the bill would be insidious. If AB 2747 becomes law, doctors would be required to facilitate death by dehydration on demand for terminally ill patients--and this "treatment" would not be reserved only for those at the very end of life, since the bill defines terminal illness as having one year or less to live. Moreover, if the doctor believes that palliative sedation is medically unnecessary and/or believes it to be ethically wrong under the circumstances, he or she would still be legally required to be complicit in the patient's dehydration death under the requirement that refusing doctors refer a requesting patient to another doctor willing to go along.

Assisted suicide ideologues--who tend to be well tailored elites--are ever about the task of subverting important ethical principles and blurring crucial definitions and distinctions in pursuit of their death agenda. But they aren't the ones who get hurt.