Wesley J. Smith

Why Our Medical Elite Support Planned Parenthood

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Source: Ancient Faith Radio

By Wesley J. Smith

It’s not only fetuses and babies that are viewed broadly in bioethics as “killable” and perhaps even “harvestable.” There is increasing advocacy, although it is important to emphasize that this is not yet happening, for killing those with profound cognitive impairments for their organs. I could adduce many samples of this advocacy, but space only permits one typical example, published not irrelevantly in The New England Journal of Medicine.

If you think it is respectable to consider babies, whether born or unborn, to be an inferior stage of human life, you can easily come to think that they have few rights that fully developed persons are bound to respect.

Listen here:

Transcript

The New England Journal of Medicine recently published a scathing editorial about Planned Parenthood’s harvesting of fetal tissues. No, the editorial didn’t criticize the organization for discrediting scientific research by killing fetuses in a “less crunchy” manner, as one executive put it, to obtain intact organs. Rather, using the highly emotive language of ideological pro-abortion activism, it attacked the messenger as “radical anti-choice” for supposedly engaging in a “campaign of misinformation” for vividly revealing the cruel practices and attitudes of top Planned Parenthood abortionists.

The New England Journal of Medicine is supposed to be an evidence-based journal, but the editorialist didn’t even try to grapple with the actual contents of the video’s release by the Center for Medical Progress, and indeed forgot to mention in their charge that the tapes “twist the truth” that the unedited originals were all released concomitantly with the edited versions, allowing for full scrutiny. Instead, the editorialists resort to the usual bromide that fetal-tissue research could lead to cures as they simply assert that Planned Parenthood follows proper ethical guidelines—all without offering any truth to rebut the contrary evidence on the tapes. They conclude:

We thank the women who made the choice to help improve the human condition through their tissue donation. We applaud the people who make this work possible and those who use these materials to advance human health. We are outraged by those who debase these women, this work, and Planned Parenthood by distorting the facts for political ends.

Technical point: The tissue in question isn’t that of the woman. It is—was—the fetus’s. Whatever one thinks of fetal-tissue research, obtaining the specimens isn’t the same as creating a cell line from an excised tumor. Moreover, utility does not justify all things. Good ethics and respect for the intrinsic value of human life are integral to a science sector supported widely by the public.

The journal’s editorialist is just one small example of how highly ideological our medical intelligentsia have become and how increasingly accepting of morally objectionable practices. To understand why this might be, why venerable medical and bioethics journals are generally supportive of controversial policy agendas such as assisted suicide and medical rationing, we have to explore the ideas that now animate the field of bioethics.

Most bioethicists, at least those without a modifier like “conservative” in front of the term, are reluctant to clearly define the boundaries that designate when human life becomes morally relevant. That leaves some of the most extreme voices in the public advocacy driver’s seat. Thus a predominant view in bioethics endorses an invidiously discriminatory approach to valuing life based on each individual’s measurable cognitive capacities.

In this view, those who are demonstrably, say, self-aware over time or able to value their own lives are deemed “persons.” Those insufficiently mature—embryos, fetuses, infants—or those who have lost those capacities, due to illnesses or injuries such as Terry Schiavo or Alzheimer’s patients, are denigrated as “non-persons.” Making matters worse, so-called human non-persons are held to have lesser worth than the rest of us.

Not only that, but under this philosophical construct, non-persons don’t have the right to life. Thus, the right to abortion is not only about protecting a woman’s right to do as she pleases with her own body; rather, abortion is also acceptable because the fetus is not deemed a person. And, indeed, for many in the field, this means that infanticide should also be allowed, and for the same reasons as abortion.

Here’s just one example. A few years ago, an article published in the Journal of Medical Ethics caused a public furor when it advocated for the propriety of what it called “after-birth abortion.” The authors inflate the scope of personal autonomy that protects what is often blandly called the “woman’s right to choose”—choose what usually goes unsaid—to a putative right not to be personally inconvenienced by an infant or the child she will later become. Thus, since an abortion can be obtained for convenience purposes and since newborns are no more persons than are fetuses, babies should also be killable, and one presumes harvestable, just as the unborn are abortable.

Here is how the authors describe their argument:

Abortion is largely accepted, even for reasons that do not have anything to do with the fetus’s health. By showing that (1) both fetuses and newborns do not have the same moral status as actual status as persons, (2) the fact that both are potential persons is morally irrelevant, and (3) adoption is not always in the best interests of actual people, the authors argue that what we call “after-birth abortion” (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.

Since a baby isn’t a person, the authors opined, not only personal aims, but also well-developed plans of parents, sibling, and—get this—society “should represent the prevailing consideration in a decision about abortion and after-birth abortion.”

It’s not only fetuses and babies that are viewed broadly in bioethics as “killable” and perhaps even “harvestable.” There is increasing advocacy, although it is important to emphasize that this is not yet happening, for killing those with profound cognitive impairments for their organs. I could adduce many samples of this advocacy, but space only permits one typical example, published not irrelevantly in The New England Journal of Medicine.

Many will object to transplantation surgeons cannot legally or ethically remove vital organs from patients before death since doing so will cause their death. Whether death actually occurs as the result of ventilator withdrawal or organ procurement, the ethically relevant precondition is valid consent by the patient or surrogate. With such consent, there is no harm or wrong done in retrieving vital organs before death, provided that anesthesia is administered.

So now we can see why those who presume to possess the greatest ethical expertise in the biomedical field are not leading the charge against Planned Parenthood’s crass attitudes towards and dismemberment of fetuses to obtain salable parts.

If you are interested in exploring these themes from an explicitly Orthodox perspective, I highly recommend the writing of Fr. John Breck. My Twitter address is @forcedexit. I also invite you to check out the Center for Human Exceptionalism at the Discovery Institute, of which I am the co-director. We can be found at www.discovery.org, where I can also be contacted.

Wesley J. Smith

Wesley J. Smith is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism. A revised and updated version of his award winning Culture of Death: The Assault on Medical Ethics in America will be released by Encounter Books next year.

Wesley J. Smith: Will Progressives Require Doctors to Kill?

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Source: First Things

By Wesley J. Smith

Secularist threats against religious liberty are spreading like a stain. Thus, I was attracted immediately to Bruce Abramson’s Mosaic column, How Jews Can Help Christians Live as a Creative Minority.

Abramson warns Christians that the space to practice their faith in the way they live is shrinking. Tell me something I don’t know, I thought. But my attention focused when Abramson (citing political scientist Peter Berkowitz) cast the trending secularist oppression we are witnessing as a clash between classical “liberalism” and contemporary “progressivism.”

Liberalism stands for “freedom and the rule of law,” he writes, “a system of ‘negative rights’ that no government may legitimately infringe (as in the U.S. Bill of Rights).” In contrast, progressives seek to ensure “equality and justice,” by guaranteeing these outcomes through the enactment of a series of “‘positive’ rights like housing, food, and health care” that someone must provide—be it government or the private sector.

Abramson’s description of the conflict between liberalism and progressivism explains the drive to promote “patients’ rights” over the consciences of doctors and other medical professionals in the abortion, assisted suicide, prescription, and other contexts. In this regard, mere legalization of these procedures does not guarantee the free and open access to them deemed by progressives as a positive right. Achieving that goal will require coercion; that is, forcing doctors (and other medical professionals, such as pharmacists) to participate—even when it violates their religious beliefs and deeply held moral convictions.

This kind of progressive authoritarianism is aborning in Canada. Earlier this year, that country’s Supreme Court conjured a Charter right to euthanasia. The debate has now shifted to whether doctors with deeply-held religious objections to killing patients should be able to opt out.

The trends are bad news for physicians who believe it would be a grievous sin to administer lethal injections or assist suicides. The Ontario and Saskatchewan Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons have issued ethics opinions that would require doctors to perform every legal medical procedure paid for by the government’s socialized system upon demand—which will include active euthanasia when the Supreme Court’s ruling goes into effect next year. If the requested physician has religious or moral objections, the Colleges have determined, the MD’s have a positive duty to find another doctor willing to do the deed to ensure that the patient receives the death she wants.

If a willing doctor cannot be found, the Saskatchewan College requires the dissenting physician to do the deed personally, “even in circumstances where the provision of health services conflicts with physicians’ deeply held and considered moral or religious beliefs.” To guarantee the positive right to die, doctors will be forced to kill. Ontario’s College even requires doctors to euthanize or refer if the person asking to die is not the doctor’s patient!

Demonstrating how thoroughly progressive thought—as defined by Abramson—has shattered classical liberalism in Canada’s medical ranks, 79 percent of the Canadian Medical Association doctors recently voted against conscience protections for physicians opposed to participation in euthanasia. In other words, in Canada, becoming dead when one is ill or disabled and wants to die counts as a positive right that trumps the negative right to “freedom of conscience and religion” enumerated in Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

What about the USA? Our physicians currently receive conscience protections against required participation where assisted suicide is legal, provisions promoters understood as necessary to gain enactment. But that approach is in danger of erosion. Some assisted suicide boosters are already grumbling about the difficulty of getting doctors to participate in ending patients’ lives where it is legal.

Moreover, the same progressive tide sweeping religious freedom aside in Canada is also flowing here. The Supreme Court has ruled that the “negative right” to the free exercise of religion guaranteed by the First Amendment does not prevent individuals from being coerced into obeying laws of general applicability when doing so violates their religious beliefs. The Religious Freedom Restoration Act, passed in response to the Supreme Court’s ruling—the law that protected Hobby Lobby from forced coverage of abortifacient contraceptives—is now opposed energetically by previously strong progressive supporters like the ACLU. If Washington is ever controlled again by political progressives as it was in 2009, expect efforts to repeal.

Not only that, the federal RFRA does not protect against state laws that infringe upon religious liberty, and state religious protections are now vociferously opposed by progressive political adherents and large corporations—as Indiana discovered recently when it was threatened with economic ruin for attempting to pass an RFRA that extended to the operation of businesses. Thus, the stage is already set for the creation of a positive right to die here that could, one dark day, subsume the religious liberty of doctors not to participate—as is occurring now in Canada, and afflicts pro-life doctors in Victoria, Australia regarding access to abortion.

The only guaranteed way to prevent medical martyrdom is to maintain laws against assisted suicide and euthanasia. If that wall ever crumbles, orthodox Christians (and others) here may, as their Canadian brethren will next year, be forced to choose between being a doctor and violating the Sixth Commandment.

Wesley J. Smith

Wesley J. Smith: Obamacare Lives

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Source: National Review Online | Wesley J. Smith

The people of the United States ensured an Obamacare future by apparently reelecting President Obama and maintaining a Democratic Senate. Here are the immediate consequences:

1. The IPAB will go into effect: As I have written, IPAB is the cornerstone of a planned bureaucratic state. The only way now to thwart that is pure obstructionism. First, by filibustering the nominations that President Obama will make to the Board. Not going to happen. Second, by defunding. Even though the House will stay Republican, I don’t see them taking that route on what, to most people, is an abstract issue.

2. The attack on religious freedom will continue: The Obama Administration is an implacable foe of faith operating outside the four walls of church or cloister. Don’t look for the president to offer religious institutions who oppose the free birth control rule anything other than lip service to accommodation of religious institutions. Businesses will be forced to take their cause to the Supreme Court. Don’t count on help there, as the technocratic statists control the court 5-4, perhaps 6-3. Eventually, we will see a free abortion rule.

3. The Mandate will now be carried out: States that have been resisting will now begin to cooperate with the Feds by establishing exchanges.

4. There will be death panels: In a centralized system, rationing is the cost containment method of choice. The UK shows us the future of the USA. Already, powerful liberal voices on health care such as the New York Times and New England Journal of Medicine, have called for it. It is going to become very scary to be considered unproductive.

5. Single Payer, here we come: Obamacare is going to eventually implode. That will also take down the private insurance market. The result, in about 10 years, will be single payer. And that is by design. Oh, and single payer’s inevitable outcome is health care rationing.

Obamacare isn’t just about health care. It is–as designed–a cultural bulldozer, forcing the left’s liberal social views on all of society. And at this point, I am not sure what can be done about it.

Wesley J. Smith: Freedom of Worship’s Assault on Freedom of Religion

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– From the essay:

Freedom of religion means the right to live according to one’s own faith, that is, to “manifest” our religion or belief in practice, both “in public or private,” without interference from the state.

Strident secularism is on the march and freedom of religion is the target, with secularist warriors attempting to drive religious practice behind closed doors by redefining religious liberty down to a hyper-restricted, “freedom of worship.”

Source: First Things On the Square | By Wesley J. Smith

Until very recently, the West saw religious liberty as a weight-bearing pillar of human freedom. Thus, the very first clause of the First Amendment (1789) states,

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

More broadly, Article 18 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) provides:

Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.

That’s unequivocal. Freedom of religion means the right to live according to one’s own faith, that is, to “manifest” our religion or belief in practice, both “in public or private,” without interference from the state.

These days, that and $2 will buy you a small cup of Starbucks coffee. Strident secularism is on the march and freedom of religion is the target, with secularist warriors attempting to drive religious practice behind closed doors by redefining religious liberty down to a hyper-restricted, “freedom of worship.”

What’s the difference? Under freedom of worship, the Catholic and Orthodox churches both remain perfectly free to teach that the Eucharistic bread and wine transform into the body and blood of Christ. Muslims can continue to require women to be segregated from men at the mosque. But outside worship contexts, the state may compel the faithful to violate their faith by acting in accord with secular morality rather than consistently with their dogmatic precepts.

These assaults on religious practice are becoming increasingly commonplace. For example, a German trial judge recently outlawed the circumcision of children on the basis that the “fundamental right of the child to bodily integrity outweighed the fundamental rights of the parents”, to carry out their religious beliefs.

Circumcision is controversial today, but redefining the rite into “mutilation” or “child abuse” is blatant secular imperialism. For millennia, faith adherents have believed that circumcision is done for boys (rather than to them). Indeed, prohibiting the rite deprives male children of these faiths a religious benefit to which they are entitled while dispossessing them of a core aspect of their personal identity.

Jewish and Muslim religious practice is also under assault in the Netherlands, where a new law may outlaw methods of animal slaughter that comply with the obligations of kosher and halal. Religious liberty? What’s that? The atheist bioethicist Peter Singer sniffed that Jews and Muslims who don’t like the ban should just become vegetarians, writing that since the ban would not prohibit worship practices, no freedoms are being infringed.

We see the same freedom of worship assault against freedom of religion in President Obama’s “Free Birth Control Rule.” The Affordable Care Act now requires that most employers provide their workers with free contraception, sterilization, and other reproductive services. True, the rule exempted religious employers that oppose contraception, but the shield was drafted so narrowly that—surprise, surprise—it only protects freedom of worship. Specifically, to qualify for a religious exemption:

The “inculcation of religious values” must be the employer’s “purpose” for existing;
The employer must “primarily” employ “persons who share its religious tenets.”
The employer must “primarily” serve “persons who share its religious tenets.”

Lest there be any doubt, the rule further states, “Specifically, the Departments seek to provide for a religious accommodation that respects the unique relationship between a house of worship and its employees in ministerial positions.” Thus, the group health insurance covering nuns in a Catholic religious order would probably not have to cover contraception. But insurance provided by the order’s elementary school employees, probably would.

Religious liberty is also under assault from efforts to eviscerate the right of medical conscience. Victoria, Australia, for example, legally compels every doctor to participate in abortion—even if morally or religiously opposed—either by doing the deed when asked, or referring the pregnant patient to a doctor they know supports abortion. The Dutch Medical Association (KNMG) recently promulgated a similar ethical rule requiring all Dutch doctors to kill, or if opposed on religious or moral grounds, refer when legally qualified patients ask to be euthanized. In other words, the affected doctors are free to believe that participating in abortion and euthanasia are egregious sins; they just can’t legally or ethically escape so sinning and remain in practice.

At this point in the discussion, opponents of freedom of religion may bring up the Aztecs, arguing that a robust view of religious liberty would require allowing children to be sacrificed to pagan gods. Not so. Even fundamental liberties are not absolute. The law properly prohibits religious practice when there is a compelling government interest. For example, the state can force a Jehovah’s Witness child to be given life-saving blood transfusions even though doing so violates Witness dogma.

Here’s the bottom line. If the freedom of worship assault against freedom of religion succeeds, creed-motivated philanthropic and service organizations such as the Salvation Army, Catholic Charities, and religiously sponsored schools, hospitals, nursing homes, pregnancy counseling centers, etc., will be forced to choose between acting contrary to their faith and closing their doors. That would not only make our society far less free, but would materially harm the millions of men, women, and children whose lives are immeasurably benefited by faithful people practicing their religion in the public square.

RESOURCES

Peter Singer, The use and abuse of religious freedom

Wesley J. Smith is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism, and consults for the Patients Rights Council and the Center for Bioethics and Culture.

Obamacare Ruling Reflects Technocratic Imperative

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Wesley J. Smith

Why is anyone surprised? Obamacare was never going to be overturned. Not that it is constitutional, as the Constitution was originally conceived. It surely isn’t. But that Constitution has been terminally ill for a long time. Now it is dead.

Why would the Supreme Court’s conservative chief justice rewrite the individual mandate’s penalty to be a tax, when the law’s authors unequivocally stated it was not a revenue generator during the legislative process? Let’s call it the “technocratic imperative” — faith in big government solutions for societal problems — a mindset that generates a far stronger gravitational pull than the standard conservative/liberal paradigm. The technocratic imperative is why, when push comes to shove, conservative judges almost always move “left” and liberal judges almost never move “right.”

The case was always about two contrasting approaches to law and government. Opponents of Obamacare mounted a legal challenge to the individual mandate. They argued that the government does not have the constitutional authority to force Americans to buy anything, and indeed that such a legal compulsion is unprecedented in American history.

Proponents responded with a strong policy defense: They argued that a modern state must have universal health coverage. In a private system, without the mandate, people will wait until they are sick before buying insurance, which would cause a financial collapse. Because the majority of the court favored the policy — even though Chief Justice John Roberts disingenuously claimed that wasn’t his concern — the majority simply rewrote the law to make it appear to fit established constitutional paradigms.

Again, why is anybody surprised? The Supreme Court has steadily expanded the power of the federal government since the 1930s. In so doing, the justices have often based their decisions as much on policy as on law — and then, as now, fashioned legal justifications to back up their decisions (which, in turn, become springboards for further federal legislative and regulatory expansion).

This corruption of constitutionalism has come about, in my opinion, because most federal judges are members of the “ruling class” — people who graduated from Yale, Harvard, Princeton, etc. — who don’t believe in localism or the power of the individual to solve society’s problems. Rather, the Supreme Court’s ruling reflects a deep faith in the ability of “experts” — operating through government bureaucracies — to fashion regulations to make all things right. (Just look at the recent upholding of the vast and increasing powers of the EPA by an appellate court.) Since the ruling class believes that Obamacare’s purposes are laudable, that universal coverage is equitable and that the mandate is a necessary element of making the new law work, it is, ipso facto, constitutional — even if the law has to be rewritten.

As I learned in law school, the Constitution is what the Supreme Court says it is. That’s why it’s called judicial legislating.

My big clue that today would come was a November 2011 decision validating the individual mandate written by one of the federal judiciary’s most conservative members, Reagan-appointed Appeals Court Judge Laurence Silberman. To wit: “The right to be free from federal regulation is not absolute and yields to the imperative that Congress be free to forge national solutions to national problems.” That’s policy, baby! Moreover, it encompasses a philosophy that places technocratic problem-solving above upholding limited government. And that’s the essence of today’s ruling.

With the coming of the Obamacare decision, a new era has now fully dawned for the United States of America — even in the unlikely event that Obamacare is legislatively repealed. The beating heart of the Affordable Care Act is technocratic. Within the next few years, unelected and unaccountable bioethical cost/benefit boards of experts will decree from central control what (and perhaps, who) is covered by health insurance, and what (and perhaps, who) are not — just as happens in places like the United Kingdom. The Independent Payment Advisory Board even has power over a presidential veto regarding areas within its jurisdiction.

In this sense, think of Obamacare as our Brussels, the E.U.’s bureaucratic central control center. The cornerstone been laid for the construction of a full-blown bureaucratic state. Limited government is dead. Long live the technocracy!

Wesley J. Smith is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism. He also consults for the Patients Rights Council and the Center for Bioethics and Culture.

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