A one year old boy, who could have a tracheotomy, be taken home from the hospital and live his life, may have his ventilator removed at the wishes of his mother and the HOSPITAL TRUST PAYING FOR HIS CARE, because his severe physical disability has been deemed 'intolerable suffering'. His father disagrees and is fighting for his son's life.
On this episode of What It Means to Be Human, Wesley J. Smith takes a look at the media’s fawning treatment of suicide advocates. What does a reporter see when he visits the home of a suicide facilitator? Strangely and sadly, he often sees a hero.
Listen in as bioethicist Wesley J. Smith shows how journalism has become a prime mover in the culture of death, to the point that its terminal nonjudgmentalism cannot be trusted.
On this episode of What It Means to Be Human, bioethicist and Discovery Institute senior fellow Wesley J. Smith takes a look at our culture’s "terminal nonjudgmentalism." How far have we come as a society when we lose the will to save suicidal people's lives? Smith examines two outrageous cases from the UK,
one where doctors refused to save a dying girl and another where a disabled man’s parents helped took him to Switzerland to commit suicide. What does the advocacy of death culture turn us into? Tune in and find out.
Wesley J Smith's new edition of "What It Means To Be Human" podcast.
On this episode of What It Means to Be Human, Wesley J. Smith examines a new extreme environmentalism that seeks to grant equal rights to . . . Nature. Yes, Nature. "Nature rights" have just been embodied as the highest law of the land in Ecuador's newly ratified constitution. Rather than establishing environmental
protections as a human duty, there is now a self-demotion of humankind to merely one among the billions of life forms on Earth, no more worthy of protection than any other part of the natural world. What is the potential harm to human welfare? Listen in as Wesley J. Smith explains how the establishment of "Nature rights" is the culmination of 2008 as one of the most radical anti-human exceptionalism years in recent history.
BERLIN (Reuters) - German historians have started compiling a central register of 9,000 mentally ill people murdered as part of the Nazis' euthanasia policy, most of whom were previously unidentified.
More than 100,000 people are believed to have been killed during a drive inspired by Hitler that was carried out in six extermination centres in Germany between 1940 and 1945.
The idea of a Nazi euthanasia campaign, backed by propaganda films portraying the mentally handicapped and incurably ill as "useless mouths to feed", was first outlined in Hitler's 1924 book "Mein Kampf" and became known as Operation T4.
Olympia, WA (LifeNews.com) -- The state of Washington has joined Oregon to
become the second state in the nation to legalize the grisly practice of
assisted suicide. Voters in the northwestern state approved I-1000 despite
strong opposition from pro-life groups, doctors organizations, disability rights
activists and Catholic voters.
With 42 percent of the vote counted in
the state, I-1000 carried with the support of 58 percent of voters compared with
42 percent who opposed assisted suicide.
Opponents of assisted suicide
had a hard time competing with the money thrown at them from the pro-euthanasia
groups that outspent them as
much as 12-1 thanks to out-of-state money.
Anyone who still says "it can't happen here," isn't paying attention. It is
happening here, and it will happen here increasingly unless there is a greater
commitment shown by those with means who oppose these agendas to reversing the
current course.
Bioethicist expert Wesley J Smith was on Monday's Albert Mohler radio program discussing "troubling new developments in the world of bioethics. From movements to dismantle human exceptionalism, granting rights to apes and even 'nature', to the spread of the so-called "right to die" crusade..."
It's worth listening to.
In Fresno County lies a woman, Janet Rivera, in a coma. Not able to eat, she uses a feeding tube for nutrients. Not long ago, some court case somewhere decided that feeding tubes constitute life support. Of course, I disagree.
Either way, the county, her legal guardian, wants this piece of 'life support' removed, and had it removed for a little while. However, Mrs. Rivera lived longer than expected, so they reinstated her feeding tube to get a judge's opinion.
Meanwhile, Mrs. Rivera's family wishes to keep her alive. So, apparently, the county of Fresno can decide over her families wishes to take Mrs. Rivera's life.
The medical ethicist and legal experts interviewed for this article, continue to refer to end of life issues, calling this an end of life issue. However, Mrs. Rivera would not be at the end of her life had the county and these medical and legal folks not stepped in.
A person could live a long time with a feeding tube. Mrs. Rivera is alive. She is breathing on her own and she is not close to death. What is at issue here, is a judgment of her quality of life. The county deems it (her life) a waste.
A waste of what- money?
Her family feels that if she had more money or better health care coverage. While those involved in this situation say that financial considerations play no role in the decision to remove her feeding tube, some bioethicists say,
that regardless of whether money is an issue in Rivera's case, her situation raises a question that's impossible to ignore in the end-of-life debate: how to decide whether it's worth spending limited resources to maintain life support in an apparently hopeless case.
"The stewardship of scarce resources does require us to take resources into account," said Ben Rich, a University of
California at Davis bioethics professor. "But it has to be done
carefully."
from the article
Gotta love that bioethics field. I am currently reading Wesley J. Smith's book, Culture of Death: The Assault on Medical Ethics in America. This is what he has to say in that book about bioethics:
Medical ethics deals with the behavior of doctors in their professional lives vis-a`-vis their patients. Bioethics, as it has developed over the last few decades, focuses on the relationship between medicine, health, and society. This last element allows bioethicists to espouse values higher than the well-being of the individual and to perform the philosophical equivalent of triage.
...bioethics seeks to create a new morality of medicine that will define the meaning of health, determine when life loses its
value, and forge the public policies that will promote a new medical and moral order. More than a set of tenuous speculations, bioethics in recent years has ossified into an ideology.
So, bioethicists work to change our morals, people debate or blog in response, and Mrs. Rivera lies in a coma, her fate in the hands of her county, apparently. Should she be allowed to suffer in this way? Not really our call. She's alive, and we aren't supposed to end a life. We are supposed to care for the person suffering, and for Mrs. Rivera's family.
From the blog Secondhand Smoke:
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.
Just in case you don't have enough blogs and websites to keep up with, I've been reading a very informative blog lately called Secondhand Smoke. It's authored by Wesley J. Smith, "a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, an attorney for the International Task Force on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide, and a special consultant for the Center for Bioethics and Culture." (From the site.)
His blog consists of his view point regarding bioethics, etc. If you go to his site, you'll need your eyedrops, as his blog is quite the eye opener... so, your eyes will get dry after awhile from being open so long while reading... okay, sorry.
Incidentally, he's also the speaker from the lecture I wrote about a few days ago regarding the absolute value of human life. I found a short five minute clip of that lecture, btw.
Just in case you don't have enough blogs and websites to keep up with, I've been reading a very informative blog lately called Secondhand Smoke. It's authored by Wesley J. Smith, "a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, an attorney for the International Task Force on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide, and a special consultant for the Center for Bioethics and Culture." (From the site.)
His blog consists of his view point regarding bioethics, etc. If you go to his site, you'll need your eyedrops, as his blog is quite the eye opener... so, your eyes will get dry after awhile from being open so long while reading... okay, sorry.
Incidentally, he's also the speaker from the lecture I wrote about a few days ago regarding the absolute value of human life. I found a short five minute clip of that lecture, btw.
