yet another never updated blog

I have been absolutely sickened by the news coming out of Britain. It's just horrible. My daughter and I have started avoiding British news and programming because of the euthanasia drive. I know we shouldn't, that we should actively confront this monster on the global scale, but there is so much bigotry, so little understanding of disability--where to start? How to get it through people's heads? It's a kind of terrorism directed at the disabled, I think. More of us have been openly identifying as disabled who in the past would have denied it and tried to hide it. We've experienced relief in doing so, and found solidarity with our brothers and sisters who are unable to disguise their differences at all. And here the bullying able-bodied world wants to shame everyone again, to clear their days of any interaction with openly disabled people. It will be those with learning disabilities and neurological problems and bad joints pretending that they don't need any accomodations, so they can keep their jobs. It will be those in wheelchairs, in braces, those who are deaf or blind, cloistered behind drawn curtains so no one has to have visual reminder of disability. And those already largely housebound pressured to submit to the ultimate exclusion, euthanasia. And once it is a common place to kill those who require nursing care, the next level of social "burden" will be targeted. None of us are safe in a culture where the answer to weakness is death.

Pro-euthanasia advocates insist that they would never pressure anyone into committing suicide. But they lie. Their language, as William Peace shows,  reveals how they routinely devalue and disparage the lives of people with disabilities.  Daniel James's parents are excellent examples, saying that their paralyzed son, along with disabled people in general, are "second class citizens." Since when is the solution to a problem of second class citizenship euthanasia? I'll tell you when! The Indian Wars! Oh, those poor Indians, losing their land and culture. Let's kill them off toot-sweet and put them out of our misery. It's a veritable final solution to the issue, one might say as one goose-stepped along. 

Euthanasia advocates also purposely muddy the waters, appealing to people's wish to resolve the suffering of loved ones who are truly dying in distress in order to get assisted suicide legalized. Thus British television viewers were given the opportunity to witness a disabled man said to be at the end of his life kill himself at a Swiss clinic while talk still swirls about Daniel James, who was not terminal. Disability does not mean dying, but if the euthanasia advocates get their way, it will soon.

I just returned from my very lovely vacation, and am catching up on my favorite blogs. And what do I find at Junkfood Science, but a review of Social Value Judgements, a report put out by Great Britain's National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence for the purpose of shaping its National Health Service's policies and budgeting. Sandy Szwarc rightly declares this document dangerous:

The entire world should care about what this disturbing document forewarns. It is the most palpable document in recent history to bring the same bioethical dilemmas, on the moral claim of personhood and quality of life versus the interests of the state, that were raised in the 1920s.

Szwarc ends with a warning that this devaluing of individual personal judgment regarding one's quality of life is

the inevitable outgrowth of what happens, as history has taught, when health becomes public. When health is a measure of good citizenship. This is the foreseeable results when government foots the bill for healthcare: the state then assumes power to decide what happens to an individual’s body and to determine when a life is of insufficient quality or too costly to society to preserve.

I think that blaming government-run health systems is too limited a view. As we've seen in the US with insurance companies, the corporate board can be just as coldly utilitarian as any government bureaucracy, and will just as readily adopt bioethical reasoning in pursuit of limiting expenditures. The real caution is for us all, no matter what system is in place in our particular nations, to value human life so much that we refuse to allow the machinery of governments and corporations to treat any of us as no more than replacable cogs.

In 2002, a French woman was told by her doctor that she Ehlers Danlos syndrome and that her life over. Amazingly, rather than immediately hit him with the nearest blunt object, Clara Blanc has decided to fulfil his verdict by seeking death. She claims she isn't suicidal, but all the same, wants the right to demand that doctors administer lethal drugs whenever she wishes.

Clara, there's virtually no chance that you will ever read this, but if you do...









GET OVER YOUR DAMNED FOOL SELF!

Fuck's sake, girl, you've got crappy connective tissue. It makes life a bitch sometimes, doesn't it? But chances are that it isn't going to kill you. And you won't likely become more of a vegetable than you already have made yourself into with your self-pity festival. Yeah, you'll probably have to use a wheelchair at some point. Big whoopdedoo. There are people having bombs lobbed at them right now. Others are being attacked by sadists wielding machetes. Some people are being held in small, dark places, tortured and unknown. And every single one of them is fighting to live. You want to die? Do it yourself. Freaking wuss, can't even take responsibility for your own death, much less your life. You claim to want to be the arbitrator of your death? What makes you think you can do that when you won't be arbitrator of your life? You can't face up to the hard choices in life. You want everything easy, and when you found out that your life won't be easy, now you want to be guaranteed an easy death.

And look at the company you are keeping. Dignitas? The Hemlock Society by any other name is still a freaking death cult. They are nothing but bastards who see someone poised on the ledge, ready to leap, and begin shouting "Jump! Jump!" You need to make new friends. People who take life as they find it and live it, knowing this is their one shot. You have plenty of time to be dead, but only now to live.

In the Gimp Parade, Blue tells us about Little Emilio and the Texas Futile Care Law. Ah, the politics of life in a state that provides only the federally-mandated minimum of resources!

The Texas futile care provision makes for some ironic situations, that's for sure. Here we are, in a state in which a pregnant woman told her fetus has a lethal condition would face tremendous odds trying to secure an abortion, if she wanted one, and yet the state has no problem with sanctioning death for the sake of cost-control. And the Catholic-run hospital is fully on-board with the futile care law. There could be no better illustration that current abortion politics are not about the right to life, but about who gets to make the decisions regarding life. Apparently, the state of Texas and the Catholic Church think that decision should rest with (usually male) doctors and government officials. One might think that institutions that truly support the right to life would be generous in making provision for the necessities of life for those who can't get them without help. But if one lived in Texas, one would know what a silly notion that is!

Via The Gimp Parade: Euthanasia in Oregon, a cautionary tale regarding euthanasia and the intentional failure to provide medical care for the disabled. As Blue points out, what happened to Tracey could happen to any of us should we lose the ability to speak.

Today's Scotsman has a horrific article about doctors calling for "active euthanasia" of infants with severe disabilities.

SENIOR doctors are urging health professionals to consider permitting the euthanasia of seriously disabled newborn babies.

The proposal, by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecology, follows the increase in the number of such children surviving because of medical advances.

The college is arguing for "active euthanasia" to be considered for the overall good of parents, sparing them the emotional burden and financial hardship of bringing up the sickest babies.

I wish I could say that I am shocked, but such outrages have been on the horizon for a long time. Of course, the advocates of active euthanasia say it is for the benefit of families and the children they wish to kill (killing is what "active euthanasia" means). Oppressors always say that they are hurting you only for your own good. Segregationists in the United States argued that Jim Crow was beneficial to black people. White expansionists argued that the reservations were good for American Indians. Misogynists argue that their restriction of women's rights equates to putting womankind on a pedestal. What do all these oppressors have in common with euthanasists? They are lying. They only one being done any good is themselves.

A big part of life is how we respond to the weaker among us. This is something that anyone, religious or non-religious, left or right, should be able to agree on. A culture in which the weak are prey to the strong is a culture where no one is safe. The very weakest must always be protected, for their sakes and the sake of all members of society.

The people who advocate euthanasia are not interested in the well-being of those they seek to kill, or that of the families of the disabled. If they were, they could address those concerns by extending themselves more. They could volunteer to take over bedside duties once a week. They could more cheerfully contribute financially. They could make sure that the homebound are not shut away from society.

Some will say, oh but these are doctors! They have already sacrificed sooooo much for everyone else and, of course, they are selfless. Please. Anyone who thinks doctors are paragons of humanity doesn't have to interact with them much. They are just as liable to be vicious bastards as that idiot who cut you off in traffic. The fact is that, to be a doctor, one has to subject oneself to some pretty dehumanizing experiences. All the good will that the 18 year old pre-med had is little defense against the animal vivisection, the corpse dissection, the resident work hours that act to dull the brain, the repeated exposure to trauma. Doctors sacrifice a great part of themselves in their journey to become doctors, no doubt. And that is why they can't be trusted with these kinds of decisions. This is why they must be sworn to do no harm and take no life. The stereotype of the doctor with delusions of godhood exists for good reason.

And then there are the "medical ethicists." Medical ethicists are like economists. They think in terms of unreality. Given a model situation, where all actors are interchangable, what would happen? Well, there are no real model situations. Models are models, and reality is messy. Reality says that some are strong and some are weak, and that the strong will destroy the weak unless there are severe social taboos against such actions. It isn't like we don't have strong historical precedent to show us what will happen when the dealers in unreality take control. Soon reality becomes a horror show that none can escape, where the only virtue is that of survival, where there are no friends, no loved ones, no personal values that are worth endangering oneself for.

Speaking as an atheist and advocate of the scientific method, I strongly denounce the pseudoscience of social Darwinism. Evolution explains the development of separate species. It is not a plan for social engineering. Those who use it that way are just making excuses for the sort of behavior that made Sparta such a delightful spot in the ancient Mediterranean, that made Hitler's Germany such a comfort zone, that has made every royal palace in history such bastions of security. That is, they are simply justifying the destruction of the weak by the strong.