Bioethics Archives

The Co-Director of Discovery Institute's Center on Human Rights and Bioethics, Wesley J. Smith, has the lead letter on "palliative sedation" at the New York Times this morning. It's well worth reading and pondering, as are the other letters that respond to a long article the Times ran over the holidays. The article's author isAnemona Hartocollis.

Given a chance to confuse and manipulate readers (as The Times does on some other cultural topics), Hartocollis' special report was remarkably sensitive and constructive.

There are two great dangers on the issue of end of life treatment: 1) that advocates of euthanasia will use confusion about pain management as an excuse to insinuate active killing of a patient, sometimes a patient who is only hurting or depressed; and 2) that well-meaning and ethical people will forego the medical attention that is totally ethical and really can alleviate suffering as the end comes. This last concern is the one that The Times article most successfully addresses.

In practice, confusion among many in the public and in medicine contributes, unfortunately, to building support for active euthanasia. In that regard, the Times article was a help for all who traditionally care about "what it means to be human."

By
Wesley J. Smith

Voters in Washington State approved assisted suicide in a vote last year, but now they are being pushed still further down what suicide opponents have warned is a “slippery slope” to outright euthanasia—to advocate for suicide, not just permit it. This Saturday, November 7, Australia’s internationally famous suicide promoter, Philip Nitschke, will bring his suicide seminar to Bellingham’s—appearing, ironically, at the “Sustainable Living Center.” He is prepared to teach all comers how they can make themselves dead, whether employing animal euthanasia drugs from Mexico or a plastic bag and helium.

But shouldn’t there be limits to assisted suicide activism? Not according to Nitschke, who bluntly takes assisted suicide advocacy to its logical conclusion. If we each own our bodies, he says, and if self-termination is an acceptable answer to human suffering, then assisted suicide shouldn’t be restricted to limited “subgroups” such as the terminally ill. Indeed, in 2001 interview with National Review Online, Nitschke asserted that “all people qualify, including the depressed, the elderly bereaved, the troubled teen.” He even envisioned suicide pills available in supermarkets.

Nitschke has put his nihilistic beliefs into action. When the Australian Northern Territory legalized assisted suicide, he created a computer program that released deadly drugs into the user’s blood stream at the push of a keyboard button. Four people died in this manner before the law was overturned by the Australian government. Until it was made illegal in Australia, he distributed custom made plastic “Exit Bags” along with instructions on its use in association with a barbiturate overdose. He concocted the “peaceful pill,” in actuality, a toxic recipe made from common household ingredients, for use in suicide so that people would not have to rely on doctors for deadly drugs. He also sells a drug testing kit to help the suicidal ensure that an intended overdose will do the job.

In 2002, a woman named Nancy Crick caused a media frenzy in Australia after announcing publicly that she was being counseled by Nitschke due to terminal cancer. After months of equivocating, she finally killed herself in front of a group of awestruck euthanasia advocates, who reportedly, applauded when she took the drugs. (Nitschke was not present.)

When the autopsy showed that she was not terminally ill, Nitschke admitted that he and Crick knew it all along. However, rather than apologize, he argued that the non-terminal nature of her condition was "irrelevant" because she was "hopelessly ill" with a painful digestive problem.

Some assisted suicide advocates will say that Nitschke’s activities illustrate why assisted suicide should be legally regulated. But why would that stop him from “counseling” people who would not qualify for assisted suicide under such a law? Indeed, that is precisely what is happening in Washington, where assisted suicide is legal for people with terminal illnesses.

More importantly, if society comes to broadly accept a “right” of the dying to receive assisted suicide—currently legal in three states—what would prevent legal access to terminal prescriptions from expanding eventually to people with serious disabilities and chronic diseases, the elderly, and the existentially despairing—who, after all, may suffer far more profoundly and for a longer time. That is precisely what has happened in the Netherlands and Switzerland, after assisted suicide became popularly accepted. Indeed, the Supreme Court of Switzerland declared a constitutional right to assisted suicide for the mentally ill.

Yes, Philip Nitschke appears to be on the radical edge of the assisted suicide movement. But he’s really just more candid. Indeed, he is often invited to speak at international euthanasia society gatherings. Should assisted suicide mentality sink into the bedrock of American culture—which alas, Washington voters made more likely last year—the question will not be whether its practice will expand to accommodate Nitschke’s dark vision, but rather, how long that process will take.

(Wesley J. Smith is a Senior Fellow in Human Rights and Bioethics at Discovery Institute.)

Discovery Senior Fellow Wesley J. Smith has the cover story this week in National Review, "The Creeping Culture of Euthanasia." If you suppose that this is a side issue, think again. Despite all the keening denials, the health care legislation being discussed in Congress absolutely sets the nation on the path to rationing care at the end of life to save money. Where else, after all, are they going to save billions?

And, as Smith makes clear, this reality is not something he alone is asserting. "Compassion and Choices," the latest euphemism for the pro-assisted suicide organization previously known as The Hemlock Society, is taking credit for this development in the health care bill.

"Health care" has become yet another euphemism.

Smith's article deserves wide distribution and National Review great credit for running it.

All of us who have a little spare tire that we would like to dispose of, and all of us who would like to reverse the tide of dying brain cells, not to mention replace injured knee cells, must rejoice in the news that Stanford scientists have found a way to convert yesterday's over-indulgence at dinner into tomorrow's cause for a Nobel Prize or Olympic Gold Medal. Eventually, as Dr. Joseph Wu suggests, you may be able to trade in your fat for whatever you need elsewhere, including brain cells.

America is to fat what Saudia Arabia is to oil. It is one of our most abundant resources and the one natural deposit that just keeps increasing. Give our unprecedentedly fat bodies over to the Stanford folk and we soon can become history's smartest and most fit people as well. Who knows what genius and agility are locked in our meandering midriffs and marbled thighs?

Meanwhile, the real news is that science is killing the argument for the necessity of embryonic stem cell research. That pathway is not only immoral, but also a dead end.

Stanford University is in California, of course, the state that is so broke it can't pay its employees. Yet the Golden State governing class set aside several billion dollars for embryonic stem cell research. If the fat in their heads had been converted into brain cells, maybe they wouldn't have made such a blunder.

Peter Singer speaks for rationing of health care, especially at the end of life, and it has become a quiet cause of many on the Left who support expanded government health care. There has to be control of costs at some point under that system, and the way to do it is to deny care to the terminally ill. Another name for this is euthanasia.

But some right wing libertarians apparently also think there is a case for rationing. This is described by Cato's Will Wilkinson in The Week.

It's an important point he makes, even if he gets it wrong. There already is cessation of care in many, if not most cases of terminally ill patients. Even the Catholic Church does not require care to continue if it is invasive and will cause more suffering than it will alleviate. We all die, after all. If people want to minimize medical care, other than pain relief, as life winds down, that is their business.

The thing is, decisions about cessation of care now are not really made very often by insurance companies, let alone by the government, nor should they be. They are made by the patients themselves, their families and their doctors, all of whom tend to err on the side of life. When they decide to call off further treatments, it is their choice, not some bureaucrat with another agenda.

With the government health care "reforms" under consideration, the decision is bound to be influenced by the government's own need to save money. That is an entirely separate and invidious issue and should not be inserted into the life and death process. In the Netherlands, many old people resist going to the hospital because they know that they might not be cared for in a way that elongates their lives, but shortens it instead.

There is a cold, callous rationality to the likes of Singer and also, apparently, to some variations of libertarianism on this subject.

Wesley J. Smith had the same reaction I did when the President identified the Netherlands as a country the United States should emulate in the provision of health care. That country has gone farther down the euthanasia path than any other.

Some commentators are indignant over the charge that "the public option", and, indeed, the bulk of the ideas loosely aggregated in the House and Senate as "health reform", would lead to rationing. It infuriates them also that the bill is criticized for end-of-life counseling for senior citizens. After all, the provision--still in the bill in several of its forms--would be "voluntary."

Our senior fellow, Wesley J. Smith, repeatedly has explained how "voluntary" in law can get translated into "mandatory" over time in the tender care of government bureaucrats writing implementing regulations. Anyone who has read C. S. Lewis' idea novel, That Hideous Strength, remembers the lovely-sounding government organization, "N.I.C.E.", the National Institute for Coordinated Experiments, that takes the therapeutic approach into the realms of compulsion and, finally, catastrophic evil.

What protestors to ObamaCare know at some level, whether they are articulate it or not, is that many older people already feel useless and unwanted. Some are clinically depressed. It doesn't take much to appeal to their self-sacrificing instincts and to elicit the sentiment, "I don't want to be a burden." Working with that concern, and also with the concurrent fear of pain, it isn't hard to get old people to sign documents that will shorten their lifespan when "the burden" becomes too great. In prospect, it seems the responsible thing to do.

We all face the end-of-life treatment choices, either because of someone we love, or, ourselves. Families, doctors, hospitals all do the best they can and situations vary. But when the government is involved and has built-in cost-cutting incentives, there is a tremendous incentive to warp the decision-making process and make it a financial triage issue. That is what President Obama was hinting at in several of the comments he has made in the past about end-of-life care. He thinks that the government cannot afford to take care of all the old and terminally ill and still give full care to the young and fit.

As I say, this subject is tough enough when it really is about voluntary decisions. But when one of the decision-makers--the one that writes the checks--is in the room and has another interest--a financial one--the whole story of life in all its gritty reality becomes a horror movie.

Smith is having a major influence on this topic. Civil liberties activist Nat Hentoff writes of it in the Jewish World Review. I myself encountered it in discussion with a Catholic priest last weekend at a christening. The word is getting out.

Congress and the White House should not imagine that the public outcry is manufactured by right wing groups, let alone the Republican Party. The blunt truth is that the Republican Party usually can't get 30 people out to attend its meetings. Right wing non-profit groups are great at riding a wave created by someone else. Likewise, talk radio.

No. The wave is being generated by ordinary people who are terrified that one of the most private parts of their lives, and one of the most important, is going to be invaded and controlled by the federal government. They don't think that the government, however benign it claims to be (and maybe especially when it claims to be benign), can be trusted. Not to really control costs without serious rationing. Not to keep new equipment and treatments coming. Not to handle patients with even the modest bedside manner provided under the current system. In fact, nothing has made the present system look better than the government's attempt to take it over.

It seems that the past weekend's hope that the Obama Administration was going to drop the public option (the nationalization option) was in vain. The struggle for public support goes on.

Whenever anyone complains about a provision they think is in the proposed health care reform, they are told that the bill isn't even written yet (except in the House). But then why the furious rush to get something passed right away?

Even backers of President Obama are beginning to get queasy over certain innovations that may or may not be in the bill. They are not paranoid, they are noticing that some of the most radical social engineers in America are involved in this project.

The co-director of the Discovery Center for Human Rights and Bioethics, Wesley J. Smith, has been covering the topic especially well, undoubtedly because he has been on this very ground for a long time.

Our Sr. Fellow Wesley J. Smith of the Discovery Institute Center for Human Rights and Bioethics is asking the question that Bill Donahue of the Catholic League and others also are raising: Is there language under consideration that could lead to "end of life care" that includes intentional termination of life? Outrageous? Well, then, the Obamacare bill should be clarified to make sure the meaning is not obscure or doubtful.

The best blog on bioethics (I am modest to report) is by our Discovery Institute colleague, Wesley J. Smith. Many of his posts tell of the cruel raids the Modern Vikings are making on civilization in such areas as embryonic stem cell research or (Yoiks!) the manufacture of artificial sperm. But occasionally, the forces of ordered morality gather together on the coasts and headlands and take a stand. How encouraging, therefore (note the July 7 post), to see the British House of Lords arise in its ermine robes to repel the barbarians on the issue of assisted suicide.

Avvenire, a prominent Italian newspaper, has been following a story there of denied end-of-life care. The reporter wanted to know the opinion of Wesley Smith, Discovery Sr. Fellow, and his replies are printed here (translated):

"After Terri Schiavo, Silence"

Wesley J. Smith is the author of numerous books, most notably Culture of Death: The Assault on Medical Ethics in America. Mr. Smith, a member of the Task Force on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide and an advocate for Terri Schiavo and her family, was happy to chat with us about “end of life” issues. He began by saying that “no human being, even if they are in Eluana (Englaro's) condition, may be called a 'vegetable'. It is a word that is intended to dehumanize them."

What is the importance of cases like Eluana, and what is the public's reaction to them?

The country (USA) is generally unaware of the Eluana Englaro case. Ever since the Terri Schiavo media circus, I think that the attention to these issues has waned, especially if they are overseas stories —perhaps because the media think the issue has been settled.

From a legal point of view, what are the repercussions of the Schiavo case in the United States?

After Terri’s death, there have been a few attempts to make it more difficult to dehydrate people with cognitive disabilities. But politicians were scared off by the media outcry against Terri’s family and the “religious right”, ignoring the fact that disability rights activists were also part of the movement to save her life.

The issue of artificial nutrition as a medical treatment is of very topical interest in Italy. What do American doctors think about it?

I don’t think that doctors behaved differently after the Terri Schiavo case. Food and water are pulled almost as a matter of routine. Most doctors think of it as just part of the practice of medicine. It is only when families disagree that these cases go to court or make news.

What are the consequences of these definitions?

Because the tube requires a minor surgical procedure and the sustenance is specially prepared to have a proper balance of nutrients, in the United States it is defined as a medical treatment. But if it means that it can be refused as you can refuse an aspirin, then there are ethical problems, because refusing food and water will have only one possible outcome: death. So I think artificial nutrition and hydration should be in a category of its own and not so easily withheld or withdrawn.

Seeing this in context shows how hard it has become in the U.S. to stop the current slippery slide into moral relativism.

Secondhand Smoke, the popular bioethics blog of Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Wesley J. Smith, is now being hosted by First Things, the distinguished journal of religion and culture. Secondhand Smoke, described by Smith as “Your 24/7 seminar on bioethics and the importance of being human,” was named a “Top Health Blog” by Wellsphere, and “One of the Fifty Best Business Ethics Blogs” by Online MBA Reviews. The American Journal of Bioethics review of Secondhand Smoke stated:

“In Smith's ‘human exceptionalist’ view, a great range of bioethical theory improperly undermines human rights by coupling rights not to our humanity simpliciter, but to our possession of certain capacities—consciousness, perhaps, or ‘moral personhood,’ or mere sentience...Thus Smith's critique runs in two directions: against those who, like embryonic stem-cell researchers and assisted-suicide advocates, use capacity arguments to justify what Smith regards as the immoral destruction of humans; and against those who, like animal rights extremists, use a different sort of capacity argument to extend rights--in his view, improperly--to non-humans, even at the expense of humans (as when People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals [PETA] activists seek to shut down medical experimentation on animals).

This core critique gives SHS an unusual combination of variety and unity.”

Smith has been affiliated with the Discovery Institute since 2004 and is the most prolific contributor to the DI’s Center for Human Rights and Bioethics project. He asserts that “In a time of when many newspapers and other information media are in crisis, it is vital that alternative methods of communicating about crucial issues such as assisted suicide, human cloning, and the dangers of radical animal rights ideology and deep ecology ‘environmentalism’ be developed and disseminated. Being part of the First Things family of blogs can only assist in that important work.”

Bruce Chapman, president of the Discovery institute lauded the development, saying, “Having Wesley blogging at First Things can only increase the penetration of Smith’s work among the general public and increase the visibility of the Discovery Institute’s bioethics project as we develop our work in this important field in the coming years.”

The blog will continue, of course, to be carried on Discovery’s own site and also www.wesleyjsmith.com .

Jack Kevorkian is in jail where he belongs, a man who repeatedly killed off people in the supposed interest of assisted suicide. That Al Pacino is planning to play this man--sympathetically--in an HBO film is a sign that human degradation has become a Hollywood staple. (Please note that First Things is now hosting our colleague Wesley J. Smith's blog on bioethics, "Second Hand Smoke.")

Discovery Institute bioethicist Wesley J. Smith describes another brazen threat against medical science researchers. Oddly, however, when one reads about the "war against science," the culprits are people who challenge the extent of human responsibility for global warming or oppose embryonic stem cell research. Where are the protests against violence-supporting opponents of medical experiments, not to mention those who want to stop irradiation of grain to prevent disease and those who prevent the use of genetically modified crops in such hungry regions as Africa?

Guest blog by Dr. Robert Cihak:

Current civil rights laws and regulations governing federally funded programs prohibit discrimination against healthcare professionals because of their ethical stance on controversial issues. President Obama's administration proposes to rescind these regulations.

Most comments on this topic focus on the provider's rights to demur from morally objectionable activities, such as referring patients to abortion providers. I think forcing anybody to perform immoral actions is illegal under the first amendment to the United States Constitution prohibiting Congress from making any law "prohibiting the free exercise" of religion, as well as the 14th amendment prohibiting slavery.

I'm a retired physician and am now receiving medical services rather than providing them. From my current viewpoint as a patient, requiring doctors to do unconscionable things would harm me and limit my access to information.

Many doctors do not believe that all medical services are consistent with their personal beliefs; these services include chiropractic, physician-assisted suicide, alternative medicine, abstinence-only contraception, abortion, and acupuncture. As a result, they know little, if anything, about the quality of practitioners providing these controversial services. Some doctors are disgusted with some of these services.

If forced to refer a patient for such services, the doctor would not know which practitioners are competent in these areas and which are quacks. How could this doctor make a good referral? How would the doctor know which of these practitioners were even adequate to perform a given service and which not? For example, would Planned Parenthood staff know which abstinence-only practitioners were good?

The patient would suffer as a result of forcing their health professionals to do unconscionable things.

My personal choices would be restricted if every doctor and hospital was forced to provide or refer for every possible service, because providers would not be able to let patients know their personal position.

In my case, I plan to avoid doctors and hospitals providing physician-assisted suicide; if everybody was forced to refer for suicide, many doctors would be reluctant to let patients know their personal position on this question, restricting my access to this information.

Repealing the federal "conscience clause" laws and regulations would prevent medical professionals from making the best possible referral for each patient. Referrals, like diagnostic and treatment recommendations, should be based on that individual patient's needs and consistent with the moral and ethical convictions of both the patient and the doctor.

If a doctor would be forced to make a referral for what he considers quack treatment, the patient would be the loser. See Freedom2Care for additional information.

Bad legislation seldom gets attention unless is passes, but a dangerous bill in Idaho nearly passed and yet has received little attention. Discovery Sr. Fellow Wesley Smith is credited with alerting Idahoans with the actual content, as this astute state blog makes clear.

This article by Discovery Sr. Fellow Wesley J. Smith in The London Telegraph is worth noting on many grounds.

The topic itself is timely, especially given Smith's recent speaking trip to Ireland and England. But it also is interesting for the reactions it elicits in the comments section of the paper. Some are reasonable, but others simply attempt to answer reason with smears. E.g., Smith opposes assisted suicide. (Check.) He is a fellow of Discovery Institute. (Check.) But (here comes the whopper) Discovery is made up of religious fundamentalists, and therefore presumably should be excoriated, then ignored. (Whoa!)

This information about fundamentalists, we are assured, comes from Barbara Forrest, a professor in Louisiana who has studied Discovery Institute. But while Forrest may teach at a university, she is no expert on Discovery. She is a propagandist, an avowed atheist in other forums who seems to have as a mission the assault of people who are not. The "fundamentalist" smear is an example. There undoubtedly are fundamentalists who have ideas on science and, well, good for them. But the term is not at all fairly applicable to Discovery Institute. The term in this case actually seems to be code for anyone who belongs to a church or synagogue.

I don't propose that atheists should not express views on bioethics. Why then should they propose that people who happen to be Christians or Jews should not express their views?

Before we go on parsing the nonsense of comment ranters, however, notice the way the subject shifts from the actual topic--whether assisted suicide leads to a duty to die for the weak and vulnerable--to the supposed unfashionable religious motivations of somebody the author knows and associates with.

Thus is discourse coarsened. People who engage in this sort of thing should look in the mirror the next time they bemoan the declining prestige of what passes for bioethics.

The corruption of language continues to debase public rhetoric. The issue is euthanasia, but it could be many others. The cultural Left thinks it can prevail largely by transforming the meaning of words. We have been warned about this for a very long time. The trouble is, there are few whistle-blowers in the media. Licia Corbella of the Calgary Herald is a commendable exception.

Apes will have "human rights" in Spain and now Mother Nature can be defended by anyone in Ecuador who feels the old dear's interests have been violated. It is a perfect collusion by environmental and trial lawyer extremists. Discovery Sr. Fellow Wesley J. Smith explains.

Euthanasia cuts short more than a life, it telescopes the process by which a dying person comes to terms with death and the ways families handle it. As Wesley Smith of Discovery Institute's Center on Human Rights and Bioethics points out, it makes death seem tacky, even banal.

Death is natural, euthanasia (and assisted suicide) unnatural. One supposedly gains a momentary feeling that he is in control, when, in truth, we never are fully in control, especially at death. There is dignity in giving in to Death, but only bathos in trying to force Death's approach.

Worst of all, euthanasia often leaves scars on the living. They will not have had the kind of tender death bed scene I witnessed recently with a family member, nor, therefore, the kind of memory that, frankly, gives great comfort and consolation. Instead there may well be shooting pangs of recollection, guilt and perhaps even the horrifying sense that something perverse and absurd was done with one's own passive or active involvement.

In time one reconciles to the inevitable death of a family member or friend. There is completion in it. But death by assisted suicide or euthanasia hangs around. It haunts.

The Swiss, who gave us the cukoo clock (as Harry Lyme famously pointed out in The Third Man) now offer a great medical advance: death. Wesley Smith, our senior fellow on bioethics, is quoted:

See Wesley J. Smith's article in today's Dallas Morning News.

I heard an otherwise sensible person comment a few days ago, "It is unclear whether we human beings are a virus or a species on this planet." People are being taught to think like that. My Discovery colleague Wesley J. Smith, one of the few traditionally-minded ethicists around, tears into a piece by an Australian TV network that represents anti-humanist propaganda. It also illustrates where materialist science and philosophy meet a literal dead end.

Embryonic stem cells hold little promise.

Other, less controversial stem cells do. But getting funding transferred from the progressively correct form to the benign and promising kind whose exploitation is entirely acceptable to us bourgeois moralists will take time. It appears that to some people stem cells lose their appeal if they do NOT entail controversy.

Whenever you see the title "ethicist" today you are likely to find someone attacking real ethics, at least the ethics that lean on the tradition of moral understanding that has developed over thousands of years and the Judeo-Christian worldview. Unfortunately, big money is invested in creating "ethicist" positions at various institutions that desire to justify cold-hearted utilitarian interests, some of them financial. Have someone who calls himself an "ethicist" bless infanticide or assisted suicide or cloning and that is supposed to make it just fine.

Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Wesley J. Smith's blog, Second Hand Smoke, covers this territory regularly and I commend it to readers of Discovery Blog. If we could raise the money, Discovery would expand Wesley's reach and have a number of people working in this under-cultivated field. In fact, we are working on that problem and could use your assistance and leads.

Meanwhile, read this latest article length blog by Wesley J. Smith:

Promoting Infanticide in the HASTINGS CENTER REPORT

The Hastings Center Report is the world's most prestigious bioethics journal. Articles published in its pages are generally in the mainstream thinking of bioethics discourse and at the heart of the process of debate within bioethics that often leads to changes in public policy--such as the discussions in the 1980s about dehydrating the cognitively impaired led to routine withholding of sustenance today.

In the last several years, Report articles have promoted a "duty to die" and a right to assisted suicide for the mentally ill. In the most recent edition, it promotes Dutch style infanticide. From the article "Ending the Life of a Newborn," (Hastings Center Report 38, 1 pp. 42-51 ) by an American bioethicist named Hilde Lindemann and a Dutch bioethicist named Marian Verkerk (no link available). The authors approve of the so-called "Groningen Protocol," under which doctors murder dying and disabled babies in the Netherlands without legal consequence. (I call it murder because that is how it is still defined in Dutch law.) The Protocol permits babies to be lethally injected if:

1: they have no chance of survival (which is sometimes misdiagnosed); 2, if they "may survive after a period of intensive treatment but expectation for their future are very grim;" or, 3 they have an extremely poor prognosis "who do not depend on technology for physiologic stability and whose suffering is severe, sustained, and cannot be alleviated."

The authors defend the Protocol from most criticisms, even to the point that they believe killing the non terminally ill is more important that terminating babies about to die:

Critics charge that the protocol does not successfully identify which babies will die. But it is precisely those babies who could continue to live, but whose lives would be wretched in the extreme, who stand in most need of the interventions for which the protocol offers guidance.

They proceed to discuss at great length the issues involved in doctors and parents determining whether a disabled baby's future life will be worth living. Here is a sampling of their murder-promoting advocacy:

Where the Dutch go further than other countries is in their shared belief that even newborns have a fundamental interest in not prolonging a life that is or will become an intolerable burden to them. This understanding is buttressed by a consensus--within the National Association of Pediatricians, for example, but also in the wider community on some criteria regarding quality of life, including the amount of suffering that is to be accepted, the capacities for communication(nonverbally as well as verbally),the capacities to live a self-supporting life, and the dependency on care institutions. It is one of the harsh realities of twenty-first-century medicine that quality-of-life judgments must be made. What we must not do is pretend that we do not already make them, and that there is somehow something morally different about doing it for a newborn baby.

One might object that even if we do make quality-of-life judgments for others, there is surely a moral difference between killing and letting die. In fact, sometimes there is, and sometimes there isn't. As James Rachels has famously argued, whether you drown your six-year-old nephew in the bathtub so that you can collect his inheritance or merely refuse to intervene as he slips and hits his head and falls face down into the bathwater, either way you are a murderer. [Me: And both are evil, just like infanticide.] We agree with Rachels that actively ending a life can sometimes be more humane than waiting for the person to die, and that in the desperate cases where death does not come of its own accord to end unendurable suffering, the morally right thing to do is to summon it.

The article assumes that guidelines will protect against abuse, but infanticide is by definition abuse. Moreover, the euthanasia guidelines for adults and teenagers have not held, so why should anyone expect that those being established in the Netherlands for legalized infanticide will? Even the authors understand that mistakes will happen and, typical of the mindset, assume that if murder of the helpless is committed in front of an open window it is somehow more acceptable:

Determining in an instant case whether the protocol is applicable will always require judgment, and because the stakes are inordinately high no matter what is decided, the judgment must be made with fear and trembling. That said, however, we believe that transparency in the deliberations concerning the ending of an infant's life--which is just as important as it is in the deliberations concerning euthanasia in adults--is adequately promoted by the protocol's requirements.

Concerning the larger question of whether the practice for which the protocol was developed can be morally justified, we think it can in the Netherlands, at any rate. When a tragically impaired infant is born into a society that is hospitable to its children, offers universal access to decent health care, and promotes an ethos among its citizens whereby they look after each other as a matter of course, we believe that the doctor's ending the baby's life could be the best, most caring response.

It wasn't many years ago that almost everyone accepted that infanticide is intrinsically and inherently wrong. No more. With personhood theory and the "quality of life ethic increasingly permeating the highest levels of the medical and bioethical intelligentsia, we are moving toward a medical system in which babies are put down like dogs and killing is redefined as compassion.

But bigotry is bigotry even if you spell it c.o.m.p.a.s.s.i.o.n. And to think, after World War II German doctors were hanged for doing precisely what is being promoted in "prestigious" the Hastings Center Report.

Yesterday I commented on the rising birth rate and birth numbers in the U.S. We are doing far better than the rest of the developed world, though we still are barely at the population replacement rate of 2.1 births per woman. (See story below.)

Today comes a report from the Guttmacher Institute that reports a decline in abortions. There were four hundred thousand fewer abortions in 2005 than in 1990. Nobody knows why, though I would give a lot of credit to ultra-sound and the word about it that has traveled among the female population. With ultra-sound you can see without question that what you are carrying is.....a baby.

Guttmacher is pro-choice in its politics, but in instances I have noted over the years, it has done creditable work on statistical matters.

Here is the story: http://news.yahoo.com/s/hsn/20080117/hl_hsn/usabortionratefallstolowestlevelindecades

Once again we have more people to cheer about: the U.S. produced 4.1 million babies last year, the highest number since the end of the Baby Boom. Welcome Future Taxpayers of America! http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/B/BABY_BOOMLET?SITE=FLTAM&SECTION=US

The big fuss does tend to slight the fact that the per-woman birth rate is only 2.1. That is merely the replacement rate for the current population. Still, it is an improvement. Thanks to all you parents who are taking responsibility for raising the next generation. I am serious. Having a child is one of the greatest votes of confidence one can cast in the future of society.

I have great respect, appreciation and affection for my demographer friends at the U.S. Census Bureau where I had the honor to serve as Director in the early years of the Reagan Administration. One number often discussed at the Bureau is "2.1", the number of live births per woman required to sustain a population. We in the U.S. have been under that number since the Baby Boom ended and the advent of The Pill. Now it seems we have reached it again. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/20/AR2007122002725_pf.html

That is good news for the obvious reason that it takes young people to keep the old people going, whether we are talking about jobs that need to be filled or Social Security that needs all the enrollees it can get. But it also is good news for the less obvious and immaterial reason that people are Earth's most wonderful and productive resource. Grouches like the Earth First crowd--the sort that think Nature would be better off without us--have little understanding of the true genius of humanity. It is that genius that has made it possible for literally billions of people to be added to the Earth since I was born and, simulataneously, for overall hunger, poverty and disease to decrease.

Among the babies being born right now are the future inventors, entrepreneurs, scientists, poets and philanthropists. They will help us all. Speaking personally, it was very satisfying at our recent Discovery Institute Open House to see all the families. I am only partly joking when I say that our employment policy is "pro-natalist". It seems that hardly a month goes by without the announcement of a new marriage or a new birth among our fellows, staff and members. That gives me hope because I know the fine quality of these people.

Darwinists, Malthusians, materialists of all stripes and dimensions don't get it. They also don't understand the reason Christians this night in the year are filled with joy to learn again of a newborn baby in a Bethlehem stable. It is because his birth is telling us that life is not finite, life is infinite.

How can one be angry with anyone today, even our adversaries? If they cannot accept a "Merry Christmas" greeting, may they still know that we wish them well.

Richard Hayes, executive director of the Center for Genetics and Society in Oakland, explains in an admirable Los Angeles Times article
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-hayes22nov22,0,340355.story?coll=la-opinion-rightrailthat many scientists who opposed embryonic stem cell research on various grounds were reluctant to say so until now: they didn't want to be seen helping President Bush politically. Hayes' candor is commendable, but the scientists' motives it perhaps unintentionally betrays are craven. It is, in truth, an indictment of the current politicization of science.

This is a serious matter. We can all be thrilled that new technology seems likely to make the use of human embryos an unnecessary source for stem cell production in research. It is a victory for human life and for common sense in laboratory science. Politically, it takes off the table an issue that hurt conservatives and that the materialist Left has been using as part of an attack on pro-life forces, whom they represent as "anti-science." It was slated to become a major theme in the 2008 elections.

But politics should not trump everything else. If scientists who were skeptical of embryonic stem cell research remained silent for essentially political reasons or were influenced by the big bucks that were behind efforts in California and Missouri to use taxpayer funds to support embryonic stem cell research, they should be chagrined now. They let their politics take precedence over their calling as scientists.

Politics was definitely at play in Missouri, for example, where the issue of stem cells on a state ballot measure was used to defeat conservatives. It was a real "wedge" issue. You can understand why the Left deployed it; polls showed 2 to 1 public acceptance of embryonic stem cell research. But that doesn't let scientists who knew better off the hook, does it? It is appalling that some scientists privately opposed embryonic stem cell research on what they might regard as liberal grounds--such as the program's exploitation of poor women for their eggs--still were guided chiefly by political correctness and kept their peace. Some others surely would have spoken out if the media had asked them. But most of the media, too, are P.C., of course.

So, on how many other issues are dissenting scientists holding their fire because they don't want to be seen helping President Bush or social conservatives? How about end of life issues? How about Darwin's theory of evolution, the sacred writ of materialism?

In some periods of history courage is demanded of statesmen, or military men, or even economists. In our period, we need scientists to show the courage of their private convictions on the whole range of issues that pertain to human dignity and distinctive worth.

We had a "heads up" yesterday from Senior Fellow Wesley J. Smith to expect a breakthrough on the issue of embryonic stem cells and now he has published on it.

Apparently, it has become possible to obtain embryonic-like stem cells from adult stem cells. If that is so, the air may go out of the campaign to get federal and state financial support for using human embryos -- human lives at their beginning -- for research on disease. If the same benefits can be obtained without exploiting incipient human lives, what excuse remains for the kind of embryonic stem cell research we have been fighting over politically?

The answer, regrettably, is ideology and politics. There are people who like the issue more than the solution. But they are going to have a harder time now.

As usual, Smith is on top of the issue.

Discovery Institute senior fellow Wesley J. Smith’s fine blog contains a report today on a study with the breathless conclusion that chimps don’t really have a human sense of fairness. Oh, but how can that be? Don’t we have 97 percent the same DNA?

Well, yes, but so what? We have much the same DNA as a mouse, too, or a tulip, for that matter. DNA is not destiny. Genes are not blueprints, but building material. Efforts to make us seem like little more than complicated apes are less about elevating the animal world than lowering the stature of human beings.
If humans are just animals, then the whole panoply of liberal views apply to the question Pope John Paul II strategically asked, “What does it mean to be human?”

Smith himself offered a timely way of posing the issue in a now-famous message that Starbucks picked up and used on several million paper coffee cups a year or so ago: “The morality of the 21st Century will depend on how we respond to this simple but profound question: Does every human life have equal moral value merely because it is human? Answer yes, and we have a chance of achieving universal human rights. Answer no, and it means that we are merely another animal in the forest.”

Not that there is anything wrong with that.

We Have Identified the Problem with the Environment—and it’s Your Existence!

I have to share the following from Second Hand Smoke blog of my colleague, Wesley J. Smith (see original post for images):

Here we go again. Newsweek reports--in surprisingly positive terms--on the movement to rid the earth of the vermin species--us:

Environmentalists have their own eschatology--a vision of a world not consumed by holy fire but returned to ecological balance by the removal of the most disruptive species in history. That, of course, would be us, the 6 billion furiously metabolizing and reproducing human beings polluting its surface. There's even a group trying to bring it about, the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, whose Web site calls on people to stop having children altogether...And "four out of five" of the people he's told about it, he estimates, thought the idea sounded wonderful. Since we're headed inexorably toward an environmental crash anyway, why not get it over cleanly and allow the world to heal?

Over time, though, Weisman's attitude toward the rest of humanity softened, as he thought of some of the beautiful things human beings have accomplished, their architecture and poetry, and he eventually arrived at what he views as a compromise position: a worldwide, voluntary agreement to limit each human couple to one child. This, says Weisman--who is 60, and childless after the death of his only daughter--would stabilize the human population by the end of the century at about 1.6 billion, approximately where it was in 1900. And then, perhaps, more of the world could resemble Varosha, the beach resort in Cyprus in the no man's land between the Greek and Turkish zones, where, Weisman writes, thickets of hibiscus, oleander and passion lilac grow wild and houses disappear under magenta mounds of bougainvillea.

The anti-human movement--lets call it anti-humanism--is clearly gaining traction when an MSM outlet of the caliber of Newsweek reports positively about the "intriguing thought experiment" of doing away with all people. To me, respecting such notions--even if in a bemused manner--is a disturbing symptom of a view that evolves all too easily from the abandonment of human exceptionalism.

Besides, if all the people were gone and earth did return to an alleged paradise: What difference would it make? Only human beings give meaning to the beauty of nature. Only human beings appreciate the grandeur of fauna and flora. Only human beings have stepped sufficiently outside of nature to be able to look back at it as something apart. Indeed, were we to disappear, the remaining denizens of the meaningless planet would just go on and on, suffering through the brutal and desperate tooth and claw struggle for survival utterly indifferent to the awesome beauty that our elimination would bequeath.

It is the view of Paul Watson of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society that mankind acts like a “virus” that is threatening the planet. Accordingly, the present world population, he proposes, should be reduced from the current 4.5 billion to under one billion. Mr. Dan Gainor, Boone Pickens Free Market Fellow at the Business and Media Institute, is indignant about Mr. Watson’s platform.

Fortunately, there is a simple cure for this conflict. All critics of over-population, such as Mr. Watson, should stop having children. They should have none.

That way, within another generation the conflict will disappear and we won’t have to deal with it any more.

Our colleague Wesley J. Smith is perhaps America’s leading critic of the “Animals are People, Too” argument. The proposition is too preposterous to warrant the interest of leading media—at least not yet.

But, as Smith shows, the attack on human exceptionalism is actually organized to undermine the dignity of human life more than to elevate our animal friends. No one doubts that part of our nature is animal or that certain animals are better designed for certain purposes than are human beings. But as Smith would say, So what? Human exceptionalism is so much more.

Click here to read more from Wesley on the chimp paper that the media has been discussing.

Our colleague Wesley J. Smith has called to my attention an outstanding article by the noted ethicist Leon Kass in the new issue of Commentary. I commend Wesley's blog and the article by Dr. Kass.

I can’t add anything to Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Wesley J. Smith’s excellent post (from First Things). Why it is all right to coerce the consciences of doctors and nurses who oppose abortion on moral and ethical grounds?

You--unenlightened as you probably are--may think that human rights for non-humans is oxymoronic, or just plain moronic. But there is a growing academic movement to assign such rights in a rather promiscuous manner to lower animals, robots (if it walks like a human being and talks like a human being, it must be a human being, right?), as well as your favorite tree in the front yard. At the University of Washington some of the most strident defenders of Darwinism are also the most ardent "transhumanists", advocating the mixture of human beings and animals into new kinds of creatures. We are not talking about transplanted organs here, but hybrid creatures. If we can clone people someday soon, why not create hybrids of people and animals.

If you think I am pulling your foreleg, catch this web entry that decries People who Like People (in preference to cows or onions or satyrs or R2D2) as "human racists." Get it? You are now some kind of racist if you think people of all kinds are more worthy of special care than various non-humans.

Of course, the net product of such leveling inevitably is not so much to improve the treatment of animals (and robots), but to justify the denigration of "what it means to be human," as Pope John Paul II termed it.

It gives me satisfaction that the "transhumanists" are critical of our "human exceptionalist," Discovery Senior Fellow Wesley J. Smith.