Wesley J. Smith notes how prominent “bioethicists” are increasingly advocating that all doctors be required to participate in euthanasia and abortion. The left is all about coercion, and we are seeing a steady march toward the death of conscience rights and freedom of religion. If we value freedom, we must speak against this tide.
October 5, 2016
Death of Conscience and Freedom of Religion
Posted by Jason Dulle under Abortion, Apologetics, Bioethics, Euthanasia[13] Comments
Thinking to Believe 
October 5, 2016 at 2:59 pm
More like a ripple on a pond than a tide. I see no evidence that the repulsive, fringe philosophy advocated by Savulescu and Schuklenk (and weakly argued, by my reading) has been adopted by their respective countries of residence. The right to die policies of the UK’s National Health Service and the proposed legislation in Canada specifically does not require doctors to violate their Hippocratic oaths. The same holds true for the legislation enacted in California, Washington, Oregon and Vermont. Which makes me wonder if the reason for Smith’s concern isn’t the unlikely potential for requiring doctor participation in euthanasia but instead his disgust with Savulescu and Schuklenk’s disdain for religion based ethical standards. Still, I shall remain vigilant, keyboard at my fingertips, ready to stem the tide and pounce on any legislator advocating forced doctor participation in assisted suicide.
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October 6, 2016 at 12:07 am
If one has no hope, then one has no hope; is it up to me to give one what it takes if one has lost all hope? That is the Abyss.
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October 6, 2016 at 6:16 pm
Baylor University Medical Center Proceedings | Dallas, Texas
2005 Oct
From Quinlan to Schiavo: medical, ethical, and legal issues in severe brain injury
Robert L. Fine, MD
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1255938/
From the above article:
The battle over the life and death of Terri Schiavo was only the most recent medical ethics case to catch the public’s attention. This case asked both the individuals involved and our society in general to make moral judgments about the appropriateness of a decision to maintain or withdraw life-sustaining treatment. As a practicing medical ethicist and an observer of the case, I was startled by the degree of misunderstanding about different types of brain injury and by more than a few misstatements about the medical facts of the case. Mrs. Schiavo was described at various times as comatose, brain dead, vegetative, minimally conscious, locked in, and disabled. These are mutually exclusive conditions. This failure of the media, politicians, and even some physicians who should know better to accurately describe Mrs. Schiavo’s medical condition was particularly disturbing, because good medical ethics begins not with the discipline of ethics but with good clinical medicine. Appropriate moral judgments about medical treatment decisions cannot be made without first understanding the relevant clinical medicine. In this article, I review the differences between coma, brain death, the vegetative state, and other profound brain injuries. I then review the Quinlan, Cruzan, and Schiavo cases to explore various legal aspects and close with reflections on some of the ethical issues related to treatment of patients with profound brain injuries.
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October 11, 2016 at 4:51 am
Frank:
I don’t see the connection. I agree the Schiavo case presents some interesting ethics issues, but ultimately it was about local politicians injecting themselves into the legal and ethical decisions of her husband and her hospital ethics review board, decisions she was not capable of making on her own. What Savulescu and Schuklenk are advocating is the total elimination of religious input into hospital ethics review board decisions, forcing doctors to comply with their patient’s health care wishes and even requiring the harvesting of viable organs from recently deceased patients. Despite the hand wringing of Wesley Smith and Jason Dulle, I see no indication that state and federal legislators are considering anything close to what Savulescu and Schuklenk are proposing.
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October 11, 2016 at 6:01 am
Again——— as in every case——– we hear from Frank who is not part of this or any discussion, in his own words. And yet again we need to respond to a fiction whose relevance seems important for Frank to re-tweet because he himself has no foundation to affirm, dispute or opine on any commentary since his original post is never his own.
Like the shadow of a ghost he remains comfortably in the darkness of obfuscation by only supporting the imagination of others. Sad…….
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October 11, 2016 at 6:44 am
“………..perform other procedures or issue prescriptions that violate their religious beliefs……………”
Religious beliefs an inviolable sanctuary? I don’t think so.
Religious beliefs allow for discrimination, crucifixion, ostracism, heresy, exclusion, rejection, hatred and refer to it as “freedom of religion”……………. all the vices within humanity stem from religious beliefs, for our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this world’s darkness, and against the spiritual forces of evil in high places where egos of wealth placate the masses with promises of treasures in the nether world called heaven by the deceivers but only after you die… Some price to pay to enter their world of corruption.
We pray that the graces of humanity will overcome the tyranny of religion and thereby return all the goodness claimed by religion to its rightful owner: Humanity, from which all virtue springs and that has been claimed as religious values by religious hijackers sooner rather than later for the time of religion’s demise is at hand.
Matthew 23: 1-39:
Religious Fashion Shows
23 1-3 Now Jesus turned to address his disciples, along with the crowd that had gathered with them. “The religion scholars and Pharisees are competent teachers in God’s Law. You won’t go wrong in following their teachings on Moses. But be careful about following them. They talk a good line, but they don’t live it. They don’t take it into their hearts and live it out in their behavior. It’s all spit-and-polish veneer.
4-7 “Instead of giving you God’s Law as food and drink by which you can banquet on God, they package it in bundles of rules, loading you down like pack animals. They seem to take pleasure in watching you stagger under these loads, and wouldn’t think of lifting a finger to help. Their lives are perpetual fashion shows, embroidered prayer shawls one day and flowery prayers the next. They love to sit at the head table at church dinners, basking in the most prominent positions, preening in the radiance of public flattery, receiving honorary degrees, and getting called ‘Doctor’ and ‘Reverend.’
8-10 “Don’t let people do that to you, put you on a pedestal like that. You all have a single Teacher, and you are all classmates. Don’t set people up as experts over your life, letting them tell you what to do. Save that authority for God; let him tell you what to do. No one else should carry the title of ‘Father’; you have only one Father, and he’s in heaven. And don’t let people maneuver you into taking charge of them. There is only one Life-Leader for you and them—Christ.
11-12 “Do you want to stand out? Then step down. Be a servant. If you puff yourself up, you’ll get the wind knocked out of you. But if you’re content to simply be yourself, your life will count for plenty.
Frauds!
13 “I’ve had it with you! You’re hopeless, you religion scholars, you Pharisees! Frauds! Your lives are roadblocks to God’s kingdom. You refuse to enter, and won’t let anyone else in either.
15 “You’re hopeless, you religion scholars and Pharisees! Frauds! You go halfway around the world to make a convert, but once you get him you make him into a replica of yourselves, double-damned.
16-22 “You’re hopeless! What arrogant stupidity! You say, ‘If someone makes a promise with his fingers crossed, that’s nothing; but if he swears with his hand on the Bible, that’s serious.’ What ignorance! Does the leather on the Bible carry more weight than the skin on your hands? And what about this piece of trivia: ‘If you shake hands on a promise, that’s nothing; but if you raise your hand that God is your witness, that’s serious’? What ridiculous hairsplitting! What difference does it make whether you shake hands or raise hands? A promise is a promise. What difference does it make if you make your promise inside or outside a house of worship? A promise is a promise. God is present, watching and holding you to account regardless.
23-24 “You’re hopeless, you religion scholars and Pharisees! Frauds! You keep meticulous account books, tithing on every nickel and dime you get, but on the meat of God’s Law, things like fairness and compassion and commitment—the absolute basics!—you carelessly take it or leave it. Careful bookkeeping is commendable, but the basics are required. Do you have any idea how silly you look, writing a life story that’s wrong from start to finish, nitpicking over commas and semicolons?
25-26 “You’re hopeless, you religion scholars and Pharisees! Frauds! You burnish the surface of your cups and bowls so they sparkle in the sun, while the insides are maggoty with your greed and gluttony. Stupid Pharisee! Scour the insides, and then the gleaming surface will mean something.
27-28 “You’re hopeless, you religion scholars and Pharisees! Frauds! You’re like manicured grave plots, grass clipped and the flowers bright, but six feet down it’s all rotting bones and worm-eaten flesh. People look at you and think you’re saints, but beneath the skin you’re total frauds.
29-32 “You’re hopeless, you religion scholars and Pharisees! Frauds! You build granite tombs for your prophets and marble monuments for your saints. And you say that if you had lived in the days of your ancestors, no blood would have been on your hands. You protest too much! You’re cut from the same cloth as those murderers, and daily add to the death count.
33-34 “Snakes! Reptilian sneaks! Do you think you can worm your way out of this? Never have to pay the piper? It’s on account of people like you that I send prophets and wise guides and scholars generation after generation—and generation after generation you treat them like dirt, greeting them with lynch mobs, hounding them with abuse.
35-36 “You can’t squirm out of this: Every drop of righteous blood ever spilled on this earth, beginning with the blood of that good man Abel right down to the blood of Zechariah, Barachiah’s son, whom you murdered at his prayers, is on your head. All this, I’m telling you, is coming down on you, on your generation.
37-39 “Religion! Religion! Murderer of prophets! Killer of the ones who brought you God’s news! How often I’ve ached to embrace your children, the way a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you wouldn’t let me. And now you’re so desolate, nothing but a ghost town. What is there left to say? Only this: I’m out of here soon. The next time you see me you’ll say, ‘Oh, God has blessed him! He’s come, bringing God’s rule!’”
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October 14, 2016 at 11:21 am
Re: post # 2.
“As individuals and as a society, we must do a better job of following the wisdom of the sage Martin Buber, who teaches us that we show the greatest respect for our patients, loved ones, and all humanity by treating each person as our moral equal, embracing the I-Thou relationship and avoiding the I-It relationship.” – From the article, From Quinlan to Schiavo: medical, ethical, and legal issues in severe brain injury
Robert L. Fine, MD
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October 14, 2016 at 12:18 pm
Bob,
Some relevant points from the article by Robert L. Fine, MD:
The first “right-to-die” case: Karen Quinlan
“In 1975, Karen Quinlan had a “respiratory arrest.” (I consider this term to be a modern euphemism for death; before cardiopulmonary resuscitation was invented, when a patient stopped breathing, life was over.) She was resuscitated and left in what was initially described in the records as a coma. Later it was determined she was vegetative. Karen’s parents asked that her mechanical ventilator be removed so that she might die, and the doctors refused. In the legal documents, the doctors indicated that they thought removing life-sustaining treatment was the equivalent of murder; they felt they had an inherent duty to protect life and specifically to keep Ms. Quinlan alive.
The case was eventually adjudicated in the New Jersey Supreme Court. In 1976, this court supported the parents in their request to allow removal of the ventilator, based on the right to privacy. The court found that families are adequate surrogates for incapacitated patients who did not and could not make their wishes known. Remember that although living wills are now fairly common, they were rarely used in the 1970s as a means for patients to make their wishes known. California was the first state to provide for living wills as a matter of law in 1975, and Texas was the second state to do so in 1976.
The court also determined that quality of life is a legitimate factor for consideration when life and death hang in the medical balance. The judges acknowledged that physicians had a general interest in preserving life; however, they went on to note a right to refuse life-sustaining treatment, a right that increased as the “chance for a return to a cognitive sapient existence declines.” This was a determinative values judgment. These judges were expressing in their judicial ruling the value of something near and dear to their own personal lives: the value of intellect and cognition over other attributes of human existence. Not all persons may place such importance on cognition; however, most do.
The judges in the Quinlan case also argued in favor of judicial restraint and noted that such cases do not generally belong in court. They mandated the formation of a “prognosis committee,” which was a concept that evolved into what we today refer to as a clinical ethics committee. Even several decades after this ruling, no clinical ethics committee was consulted in the SCHIAVO CASE (emphasis added). At Baylor, members of our ethics consultation service have worked with many a divided family. Thankfully, in 20 years of ethics consultation, we have never come across a family so divided that we could not eventually achieve some sort of reasonable resolution.
Although the judges ruled in favor of the family and the mechanical ventilator was withdrawn, Karen Quinlan turned out not to be dependent on the ventilator. Remember that she was in the vegetative state, and such patients do not require mechanical ventilation in the absence of heart or lung disease. Her parents did not request removal of her “feeding tube,” and thus she lived for 10 years in a nursing home supported by ANH before dying from pneumonia.”
THE ETHICS OF ARTIFICIAL NUTRITION AND HYDRATION
“Medical ethics, at least as practiced at the bedside in the form of clinical ethics, properly starts with medical science and then moves to human behavior, spirituality, health law, and finally moral argumentation. That’s why moral argumentation appears at the end of this article. Much of the ethical debate in the Schiavo case has focused on ANH for patients in the vegetative state. Although many moral traditions have contributed to that debate, it is particularly helpful to consider the Catholic tradition. In the field of clinical ethics, we often appeal to concepts such as benefit and burden analysis, proportionality, or double effect, concepts commonly associated with the Catholic moral tradition. In addition, Terri Schiavo, Karen Quinlan, and Nancy Cruzan were all Catholic. The Catholic tradition offers two competing viewpoints on the morality of withholding or withdrawing ANH.”…
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1255938/
Bottom line, if you want to better your chances that your wishes will be carried out should you be incapacitated and avoid needless grief for your loved ones then be sure to execute a valid living will.
– Frank
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October 14, 2016 at 12:43 pm
So if a patient has lost all hope for living and wants to die how does the I-thou embrace support the patient who wants euthanasia? Which is why and how Post #2 calls the lost hope the abyss of no return so how can somebody spark the hope of the person who has lost all hope is the point.
In life, the love of self and neighbour is I believe what Buber is referring to not after the person who has lost all hope and then becomes an “it”.
It must be a terrible dilemma to have a suffering person denied assisted suicide; on the other hand, it is a terrible dilemma for a person, not in pain, but wants assisted death based on a diagnosis that could lead to a suffering life later on. That to me would be a worse dilemma especially with the way health benefits in medicine is growing.
Imagine if all the people with AIDS had requested euthanasia because they lost hope then, when now, advances have prolonged lives for so many who without the hope to stay alive for as long as it takes, would only be memories in somebody’s mind.
So should we try to talk the hopeless person out of their hopelessness? I think that would be more preferable to debating the issue of whether or not euthanasia should be legal or not legal.
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October 14, 2016 at 5:27 pm
Living will? Absolutely. Worked for my parents, which in their cases amounted to DNR, do not resuscitate, orders at the end of life. Made it easier on everyone else in the family.
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October 15, 2016 at 12:07 am
Bob, the concern is that their ideas are spreading and will eventually become policy. After all, horrible practices typically start as ideas in the academy first, and at first the idea is always in the minority. The tide in bioethics and medicine is heading in the way these people are advocating. Freedom of conscience is not sacrosanct anymore.
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October 16, 2016 at 10:24 am
Re: post # 9.
For clarification on Buber:
http://www.iep.utm.edu/buber/#SH2b
From the above submittal:
b. “I-Thou” and “I-It”
Martin Buber’s most influential philosophic work, I and Thou (1923), is based on a distinction between two word-pairs that designate two basic modes of existence: I-Thou” (Ich-Du) and “I-It” (Ich-Es). The “I-Thou” relation is the pure encounter of one whole unique entity with another in such a way that the other is known without being subsumed under a universal. Not yet subject to classification or limitation, the “Thou” is not reducible to spatial or temporal characteristics. In contrast to this the “I-It” relation is driven by categories of “same” and “different” and focuses on universal definition. An “I-It” relation experiences a detached thing, fixed in space and time, while an “I-Thou” relation participates in the dynamic, living process of an “other”.
Buber characterizes “I-Thou” relations as “dialogical” and “I-It” relations as “monological.” In his 1929 essay “Dialogue,” Buber explains that monologue is not just a turning away from the other but also a turning back on oneself (Rückbiegung). To perceive the other as an It is to take them as a classified and hence predictable and manipulable object that exists only as a part of one’s own experiences. In contrast, in an “I-Thou” relation both participants exist as polarities of relation, whose center lies in the between (Zwischen).
The “I” of man differs in both modes of existence. The “I” may be taken as the sum of its inherent attributes and acts, or it may be taken as a unitary, whole, irreducible being. The “I” of the “I-It” relation is a self-enclosed, solitary individual (der Einzige) that takes itself as the subject of experience. The “I” of the “I-Thou” relation is a whole, focused, single person (der Einzelne) that knows itself as subject. In later writings Buber clarified that inner life is not exhausted by these two modes of being. However, when man presents himself to the world he takes up one of them….
* * * * *
“So should we try to talk the hopeless person out of their hopelessness?”
That depends on how you answer the question: “Am I my brother’s keeper?”
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October 17, 2016 at 6:04 am
That’s an unsupported generalization, TheoRumin, with no scholarly documentation to back it up. Other than late term abortion, what specific examples do you have to support your contention that liberal academic philosophers are the scourge of human moral and ethical health care standards? Personally, I find Savulescu’s and Schuklenk’s arguments to be nothing more than a long list of sophistic and irrelevant analogies and thus see no reason why any reasonably just society would find their recommendations worthy of consideration. Which brings me back to my original post (post #1). What is the concern, that society might be foolish enough to adopt Savulescu’s and Schuklenk’s proposals, or that they that they are blatantly hostile to religious input to hospital ethics review boards? A strong case can be made attacking the merits of Savulescu’s and Schuklenk’s weak and illogical arguments. If society ultimate adopts their proposals it will be because people like Smith wasted the opportunity to dismember their specific arguments and instead made an appeal for religious freedom. That may appeal to the base, but it won’t win the general election.
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