Wesley J. Smith

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Wesley J. Smith

For now, Obamacare preserves a private financing system—no public option. Nonetheless, it still represents a government takeover of healthcare. By eliminating risk assessment–and seizing control of benefit determinations—government bureaucrats will now choose winners and losers. Because we are all now ensconced in the same closed system, we each now have a direct financial stake in the health care received by every other one of us.

Government control is, by definition, intensely political. Politically powerful “in crowds” are rarely denied what they want, while “out crowds” may be excluded altogether. The same will be true in health care.

Canada is a vivid example, where terminal cancer patients are routinely refused life-extending chemotherapy by cost containment boards, while support is growing to fully fund IVF (recently allowed in Quebec) and abortions must be publicly paid.

The UK presents another disturbing look into our potential future. In the UK, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) imposes an explicitly utilitarian quality of life rationing, with the aged, for example, refused treatments available to younger people. Obamacare was written to establish a similar centralized federal oversight system.
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Wesley J. Smith

Wesley J. Smith, noted author on human rights and occasional commentator on the AOI Blog was interviewed on National Review Online on his upcoming book, A Rat Is a Pig Is a Dog Is a Boy: The Human Cost of the Animal Rights Movement. Smith discusses the difference between animal rights and animal welfare, human exceptionalism, the ongoing devaluation of human life, and about his friendship with novelist Dean Koontz, who wrote the preface.

My recommendation? Read the book. If you have read any of his other works, you will know that Wesley J. Smith will, in short order, bring you up to speed on the ideas streaming into the culture that devalue human life and threaten the bulwarks built throughout the centuries against human suffering, cruelty, brutality, and finally tyranny. Smith writes from a human rights perspective, drawing on the great tradition of the elevation of the human person — sometimes hard fought and not without sacrifice — that informed the moral imagination of Christendom until well into the last century. Now the tables are turning and Smith warns us that if we don’t wake up to the threat, the threat might overtake us.

Listen here:

Occasional commentator to AOI blog and human rights activist Wesley J. Smith warns in a recent article that, “society’s belief in the unique moral value and importance of human life is under unprecedented assault…Most people still believe in human exceptionalism and are unaware that powerful social and cultural forces are working diligently to dismantle the sanctity of life ethic as the fundamental value of our social order.”

He is correct. Read it carefully, think through the logic, and heed the warnings. The crisis in the West is one of anthropology with ominous implications.

Wesley J. Smith

By Wesley J. Smith. Published on The Church Report website.

Society’s belief in the unique moral value and importance of human life is under unprecedented assault. Most people still believe in human exceptionalism and are unaware that powerful social and cultural forces are working diligently to dismantle the sanctity of life ethic as the fundamental value of our social order.  But the time has come to pay attention.  If human life is knocked off the pedestal, universal human rights will be impossible to sustain.

Take bioethics, the influential field that exerts tremendous influence over medical ethics and health care public policy. The bioethical mainstream disdains the sanctity of life ethic as irrational and based on religion. In its place, they promote “personhood theory,” that equates moral value with cognitive capacities such as being self aware over time. This “quality of life” ethic, as it is sometimes called, creates a two-tiered system in which some humans have greater value than human non persons.

Who are these so called human non persons? All the unborn, to be sure, a presumption used to justify embryonic stem cell research, even fetal farming—growing fetuses to the later stage of gestation for use as organ sources, an odious idea already been promoted at the Huffington Post.

Personhood theory also denies the equal value of newborn infants. Thus, Princeton University’s Peter Singer—the most famous bioethicist in the world—argues that infants can be killed if they don’t serve their family’s interests.  He even compared the value of babies to that of fish, writing in Rethinking Life and Death, “Since neither a newborn infant nor a fish is a person, the wrongness of killing such beings is not as wrong as killing a person.” Continue reading →