"ALL CAPS IN DEFENSE OF LIBERTY IS NO VICE."

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

EZEKIEL EMANUEL AND LEBENSUNWERTES LEBEN

The New Duranty Times profiled the White House Chief of Staff's older brother, Ezekiel, a "bioethicist" who has advocated that doctors abandon the Hippocratic Oath and has provided the philosophical justification for medical care rationing.

Of course, the Times defended him.
“He is a serious oncologist and bioethicist, so the kinds of charges that have been raised against him are particularly inappropriate,” said Gail R. Wilensky, a Republican and senior White House health care adviser under the first President George Bush who criticizes Mr. Obama’s plan as being too reliant on the federal government.
Of course, that is really no defense. He is not criticized for being unserious, but for advocating an essentially unethical and evil point of view.

And the article goes on to demonstrate an example of Ezekiel Emanuel's disturbing thought:

Ms. McCaughey, Ms. Palin and others have based accusations that Dr. Emanuel would direct treatment away from the disabled on a 1996 paper he wrote for the Hastings Center bioethics institute.

In it, Dr. Emanuel did not assert that “medical care should be reserved for the nondisabled, “ as the critics have said.

The paper laid out what he called a growing consensus among competing political philosophies about how a society should allocate health care services. In clinical terms, he said that consensus held that those who “are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens” should not be guaranteed the same level of treatment as others.

He cited as an example, “not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia.” [Emphases added.]

The point here is not that Emanuel advocates killing the disabled, but that his position does not allow any moral line to be drawn.

We know what sort of "bioethicist" Ezekiel Emanuel is.

As in the famous apocryphal comment made by Winston Churchill, who having won the agreement of a young debutante next to whom he was seated at a charity dinner, that she would be willing to sleep with him if he donated one million pounds to the charity, responded to her shocked protest --"Just what do you think I am?!" -- when he repeated the offer, but this time for merely ten pounds: "I have just established that. Now I'm only haggling about the price."

We know that Ezekiel Emanuel has provided a number of different justifications for denying medical care to the disabled and demented.

He's only haggling about whom he wishes to put into that category.

He has provided the essential justification for the elimination of what the German medical profession diagnosed as "lebensunwertes Leben," that is, life that is unworthy of life. Although usually described (for example, in the Wikipedia entry) as a "Nazi designation," the term was first used in print in 1920, well before the establishment of the National Socialist movement or the Third Reich, by Karl Binding, a jurist, and Alfred Hoche, a psychiatrist. They were not fringe characters. Binding was a prominent professor who became Rector of the University of Leipsizg. Hoche was the director of the psychiatry department at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau beginning in 1902.

Ezekiel Emanuel's fellow "bioethicist" Baroness Mary Warnock, described as Britain's leading moral philosopher, has said:

"If you're demented, you're wasting people's lives – your family's lives – and you're wasting the resources of the National Health Service. I'm absolutely, fully in agreement with the argument that if pain is insufferable, then someone should be given help to die, but I feel there's a wider argument that if somebody absolutely, desperately wants to die because they're a burden to their family, or the state, then I think they too should be allowed to die."[3][4][5]

People have every right to be concerned about Obamacare.

1 comment:

Thingumbobesquire said...

Methinks Messer Rutenburg doth protest too much.