Using Unconscious Patients as So Many Organ Farms
The importance of accepting the intrinsic value of human life cuts across almost every major bioethical issue facing society today. In this San Francisco Chronicle column, I describe how our most vulnerable brothers and sisters--those diagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state--are being looked upon increasingly by many bioethicists as so many organ farms or guinea pigs for use in medical experimentation. "Those we would exploit," I write, "we must first dehumanize." A favored approach to dehumanizing the unconscious is to redefine them as dead. I envision the kind of scenario that this kind of advocacy--which appears in the world's most respected medical and bioethics journals--could lead.
"Consider the kind of scenario this advocacy contemplates: Alice, a woman in her late 20s, nearly drowns. Aggressive CPR restarts her heart but she remains unresponsive for six months. Doctors tell her husband Jack she is in a persistent vegetative state--and although the diagnosis is difficult to make with certainty and is often wrong--they conclude she will never awaken.
"Since the law now considers a persistent vegetative state the same as being dead, the state issues a death certificate. Jack assures doctors that Alice wanted her body used for science if she ever died or became profoundly incapacitated. Accordingly, her 'breathing cadaver' is transferred from a nursing home to a major organ transplant center. Soon, her kidneys are removed for transplantation into renal patients. Doctors then implant pig kidneys. Alice survives the surgery and continues to breathe on her own. She lives for years in isolation as researchers continually test for dangerous porcine viral infections. When the experiment concludes, Alice is lethally injected -- which is not considered euthanasia because she is already legally dead -- and her remains are cremated."
It's an ugly, but no longer unthinkable, scenario. To avoid this unethical and immoral exploitation of the most vulnerable among us, we must cling to the crucial understanding that human life matters.
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 9:17 AM
5 Comments
5 Comments:
Ill. Totally and completely ill. I read your article in SFC and couldn't agree more. Man, we've turned into some seriously barbaric dirtbags.
Only if they prevail.
Congratulations to Wesley J. Smith for pointing out the shallow and misguided thinking of so-called bioethicists.
In fact, systematic euthanasia has already been routine in intensive care nurseries for fifty years against premature babies suspected of having allegedly "defective germ plasm". To weed out babies with this alleged "defect", a few eugenics-minded American nursery doctors ran a fraudulent study in 1955 to falsely proclaim that oxygen breathing help put premature babies at risk for blinding by retinopathy of prematurity. That is why doctors still withhold this life-saving gas from the preemies who need it most. Their fake doctrine has killed thousands of preemies and continues to harm many of them, as documented at my website retinopathyofprematurity.org.
Instead of acknowledging the research fraud, later doctors rigged other studies in the 1990s to falsely deny the real cause of the blinding which is the overly bright fluorescent nursery lighting.
These frauds and denials show again how fake the entire current "bioethics" is.
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Plus, there is the advocacy among some bioethicists for infanticide, based on the flawed premise that newborns aren't persons because they have not yet developed sufficient cognitive capacities.
When we decide we can decide which humans have greater value than others, we open the door to killing, oppression, and exploitation. Thanks for contributing to Secondhand Smoke, Peter.
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