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Culture of Death: The Assault on Medical Ethics in America
When his teenaged son Christopher, brain-damaged in an auto accident, developed a 106-degree fever following weeks of unconsciousness, John Campbell asked the attending physician for help. The doctor refused. Why bother? The boy’s life was effectively over. Campbell refused to accept this verdict. He demanded treatment and threatened legal action. The doctor finally relented. With treatment, Christopher’s temperature subsided almost immediately. Soon afterwards he regained consciousness and today he is learning to walk again. This story is one of many Wesley J. Smith recounts in his groundbreaking new book, Culture of Death. Smith believes that American medicine ?is changing from a system based on the sanctity of human life into a starkly utilitarian model in which the medically defenseless are seen as having not just a ?right’ but a ?duty’ to die.” Going behind the current scenes of our health care system, he shows how doctors withdraw desired care based on Futile Care Theory rather than providing it as required by the Hippocratic Oath. And how ?bioethicists” influence policy by considering questions such as whether organs may be harvested from the terminally ill and disabled. This is a passionate, yet coolly reasoned book about the current crisis in medical ethics by an author who has made ?the new thanatology” his consuming interest.
Hardcover
First published January 31, 2000
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
February 18, 2012
I think anyone who has had a family member in the hospital, has been in a hospital or will be in a hospital (ie, everyone in America) will find this an eye-opening account of how far medical ethics have slid in the last 20-30 years. Meticulously researched, this book made me think more carefully about organ donation, animal research, quality of life & the value of life, and even have a better understanding of how fuzzy some of these medical definitions can be! And how careful we need to be about preserving the dignity of the patients and their families' rights.
June 12, 2026
“Culture of Death:
A small but influential group of philosophers and health care policy makers are working energetically to transform our nation’s medical practice and health care laws.
Life’s Dominion Ronald Dworkin
James H Armstrong vs The State of Montana
Cutting-edge bioethics now holds that there is nothing special per se in being human and thus bioethicists have generall abandoned the sanctity of life ethic that proclaims the inherent moral worth of all people.”
The favored term for humans used by the movements advocates is Beings- a term that includes nonhumans.”
In our era, theory too easily becomes practice— non-persons can be killed, abandoned medically, experimented upon, or otherwise exploited as a natural resource.”
Desired medical treatment is refused in hospitals and nursing homes to patients who are dying or disabled.”
Futile Care Theory
Doctors, nurses and other staff pressure family members to permit their seriously brain damaged relatives (stroke, demented, cognitive disabilities) to be dehydrated to death by the removal of tube-supplied food and water.
Research animals enjoy greater legal protection under federal law than human subjects in medical experiments
Oregon legalized assisted suicide- called comfort care, pain control. The state denies curative treatments to late-stage cancer and very low birth weight babies.”
Parents of infant with Down syndrome and doctor intentionally allowed baby to starve to death. They were acquired of criminal wrongdoing.”
Popular culture promotes many of these practices as a compassionate response to the trials and tribulations of illness and a necessary adjustment to an obsolete, religiously based ethical system.
Reported instances of desperate patients in hospitals calling 911 because they were unable to get needed medical attention.”
The ethics of health care are devolving into stark utilitarianism, which has begun to undermine the do no harm credo that for millennia been the cornerstone of medicine.”
They urged the family to accept his quick death as the solution to his medical condition and to their own continuing emotional struggle. Withhold tube-supplies food and fluids.”
Because of the almost imperialistic view of their mandate, many bioethicists presume a moral expertise of breathtaking ambition and hubris.”
Bioethics seems to create a new morality of medicine that will define the meaning of health, determine when life loses its value, and forge the public policies that will promote a new medical and moral order.”
Bioethics by definition is a goal-oriented movement attempting to affect political outcomes.”
Many bioethicists believe fervently that there needs to be a radical transformation in how we live and how we think based on new biological knowledge because our values, our ethical principles, our self conception are based on outmoded religious or philosophical ideas that they think have been discredited.”
Dismantle traditional Western values and notes and forge a new ethical consensus based on values most people do not presently share.”
Thousands of ethicists and bioethicists professionally guide the unthinkable on its passage through the debatable on its way to becoming the justifiable, until it is finally established as the unexceptional.” Richard John Neuhaus.
Dehydrate cognitively disabled people to death by removing their feeding tubes. Routine practice in nursing homes and hospitals.”
Procure organs from people in coma.
The American people as a whole are a religiously affiliated or God believing people. There is a kind of condescension towards the views of the general public among bioethicists and a considerable divide about core moral views.”
The bioethics view has been taken over by a secular form of doing ethics that is very little informed by any kind of metaphysical or transcendent view.”
Bioethicists proclaim answers to questions based on attitudes, sensibilities, and notes that are not shared by the people who benefit from their moral expertise.”
Leon Kass: “There is a very real danger that what constitutes a meaningful life among the intellectual elite will be imposed on people as the only standard by which the value of human life is measured.”
Much of modern bioethics is subversive of this tradition of common morality. There is nothing in itself either valuable or inviolable, except utility.” John Keown
Radical utilitarian Joseph Fletcher created situational ethics which emphasize cutting loose from moral rules and view reasoned choice as basic to morality. Once he freed himself from moral rules Fletcher developed a worldview that was both anarchic and totalitarian.”
Paul Ramsey
Peter Singer
John Harris: it is not wrong to kill non-persons or fail to save their lives.
Baruch A. Brody
Once people are defined as organisms…is the key that allows us to exploit nonperson as if they weren’t people but merely natural resources.
Ronald Dworkin: killing the weak and helpless can actually be a method of upholding the inherent value of all human life.”
To assert that having an abortion is somehow to embrace the inviolability of every stage of every human life is simply ludicrous.
Dworkin asserts that euthanasia is not a rejection of the sanctity of human life but an embrace of it.
The death of an adolescent girl is worse than the death of an infant girl because the adolescent death frustrates the investment she and others have made in her life.”
Gilbert Meilander
Hippocratic oath is under attack for 20 years and is in acute danger of collapse.”
Once Hippocratic oath is weakened, bioethics began to replace it with medicine practiced for the greater good of the society rather than the individual patient.
Only 8% of doctors pledge to foreswear abortion. Only 14% of doctors promise not to commit euthanasia.”
The antipathy of relativist bioethics to religion emerged early.”
Bioethics now stresses that morality and proper behavior are best determined through rational analysis based on secular philosophical precepts.”
Many modern bioethicists are agnostic or atheist.
Bioethics is imposing a kind of ethics on a population that profoundly disagrees with its most basic assumptions.”
Dame Cicely Saunders and Tasmania
Modern Bioethics: utilitarian, quality of life ethic, Georgetown mantra.
To the utilitarian there is neither objective right or wrong: actions are measured subjectively based on desired or actual outcomes and on ends that justify the means.”
The Elimination of Morality Anne Maclean
Ethical ideals like individuals rights, the sanctity of life, Justice, purity, are incompatible with utilitarianism •
The problem with the concept of quality of life arises when it ceases to be a factor in medical decision making and instead becomes the factor.
We should treat human beings in accordance with their ethically relevant characteristics. They include: consciousness, capacity for physical, social, mental interaction, conscious preference for continued life, and relationship with others who would grieve.
Subjective notions of human worth are about raw power and who gets to do the judging.”
There is a great revolution against disabled people that is visceral. This disdain is masked as compassion.
There is nothing inherently wrong with the guidelines of the Georgetown Mantra but in the relativist context in which they exist, Unanchored in morality, these guidelines are entirely malleable and subject to manipulation in order to obtain a desired outcome.”
Once a patient is allowed to choose death, the caregiver does not have to impose treatment for fear of malpractice liability. The sense of tragedy connected with death and denial of treatment to the hopelessly ill can be mitigated.”
As to the abuses that would inevitably follow if his proposal were accepted, Funk shrugs and says “ the world is full of slippery slopes.”
They believe it is even a case of good riddance, since sanctity of life is archaic in a Darwinian world with too many people competing for too few resources.”
Striking and disturbing parallels exist between the manner in which eugenic theories were developed and put into practice. Like eugenics, bioethics creates hierarchies of human worth intended to justify medical discrimination.”
Francis Galton
Both eugenics and bioethics reject equal human moral worth. Both are utilitarian-based.
Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland: ethics of medicine are a good indicator of the moral health of society and when medical practice is corrupted, society is soon to follow.”
Because of eugenics theories, social Darwinist beliefs, and the deprivations caused by war, HALF of Germany’s mental patients were starved to death during WWI.”
Permission to Destroy Life Unworthy of Life.”
Binding and Hoche describes euthanasia as merely fulfilling the patients urgent wish(autonomy); defined killing ill and disabled people as a healing act (beneficence); promoted euthanasia as necessary to fulfill other urgent needs that were going wanting because of the cost of caring for disabled people (distributive Justice).
Between 1933-1945 German physicians did not take the Hippocratic Oath.”
The German medical establishment participated in the euthanasia Holocaust because they had convinced themselves that they were performing a healing service for the child, the family, and the Reich.”
Ernst Wetzler- infanticide; invented incubator
Because of public pressure, Hitler rescinded the T-4 program but not the infanticide directive.”
Doctors must never allow themselves to be seduced into accepting dual loyalties. The welfare of each individual patient must be the physicians unqualified concern•
Whatever proportions these crimes finally assumed, it became evident that they started from small beginnings. It started with acceptance of the attitude that there is such a thing as life not worthy to be lived.”
We have compartmentalization atrocities. There are substantial problems with researchers mindsets and inherent structural weaknesses in the system of check and balances that permit terrible abuses.”
If researchers deemed an infant’s potential for life to be of insufficient quality, his or her parents would be strongly advised against medical treatment.”
Subjects have been injected with drugs designed to exacerbate their delusions and hallucinations and/or have had effective medications withheld to see how quickly they became sick again.”
The trouble with IRB system is that they represent the research center more than they do human subjects. Most members are employees of the research center and reflect the culture of the research center.
By 1970s some of the worlds most respected doctors and philosophers began again to suggest openly that it should be ethical to kill disabled babies or neglect them to death.” James Watson, Francis Crick
Baby Jane Doe- neglected and killed (starvation, dehydration) by parents and doctors. Parents refused others to adopt her and wanted her dead.
Several of Arthur’s medical colleagues testified that such medical neglect of babies born with significant abnormalities is normal medical practice.”
Dr John Lorber: The wound should be left open. If an infection develops no antibiotics should be given. If excess fluid accumulated in the head this should not be drained. If babies did not eat and lost weight, they should not be tube-fed. Few is any would live longer than six months.”
Singer knows that it would not pay for him to discuss the killing of healthy babies and so he almost always addresses the issue in connection with disabled infants.”
Peter Singer is a child of German/Austrian Jews who lost family members in the Holocaust.
Whatever the supporting ideology, a murdered baby is a murdered baby.”
Baby Knauers doctors willingly murdered their patient at the request of his father.”
Jonathan Glover wrote that infanticide is not morally wrong because babies are replaceable.”
In Netherlands most of the killings were at the request of parents.
Physician assisted deaths for neonates is virtually never reported.”
The child was in agony primarily because she was neglected medically.”
If the infants prospects don’t measure up what the doctor and parents believe is a life worth living, the child can be medically neglected to death or if that doesn’t work, killed by the doctor via lethal injection.”
Most partial birth abortions occur after the 20th week, it is more accurate to call it premature labor, followed by a partial delivery, and then killing of the almost-born child.”
Causing death by dehydration and starvation to cognitively disabled people is legal in all 50 states.
Defining artificial nutrition as a treatment instead of humane care was a crucial step in the development of the culture of death.”
Early 1980s some bioethicists began to wonder whether disabled frail elderly people were living too long.
Danial Callahan: a denial of nutrition may be the only effective way to make certain that a large number of biologically tenacious individuals actually die.”
Paul Ramsey: when a patient is actively dying and can no longer assimilate food and water, then it is humane to desist from providing such care.”
Fred Rosner: for physicians to remove food and fluids attacks the very foundation of medicine as a profession. Food and fluids do not become medical therapy just because another person is needed to provide them.”
The advocacy of bioethicists profoundly influenced court decisions and legislation on the issue of removing food and fluids from people in PVS.
Nancy Cruzan
The sparse testimony was all the judge needed to rationalize doing what he wanted to do all along.”
It took only 10 years from the beginning of the bioethics debate about dehydration for people with PVS to be viewed as objects, vegetables, mere biological life; a disposable caste whose intentional killing is proper and compassionate.”
Maria Lidia Lopez
Marjorie Nighbert
If we are to err…we must err in preserving life.
Death by dehydration takes 10-14 days. It is an extremely agonizing death.”
The patient would not require strong drugs to palliative suffering except for being denied the basic humane provision of food and water.”
Robert Wendland
With much money to be made by keeping people going, it is not altogether surprising that some patients were treated as mere commodities in a way that assaulted their human dignity.”
The process of dying needs to be got out of the hospitals and back into the home and in the midst of family, neighborhood, and friends.
The sting of dying is solitude. Desertion is more choking than death and more feared. The chief problem of the dying is how not to die alone.”
The intense emphasis placed on autonomy by bioethics training has made it far easier for health care professionals to accede to requests to terminate life-saving care made by vulnerable, depressed people in their darkest hours.”
Elizabeth Bouvia: what Bouvia really needed at the time of her profound emotional crisis was not cold autonomy but intervention and sufficient time to recover her equilibrium.”
Her attorney (Hemlock Society) is the one who ultimately committed suicide.”
Because of the increasingly extreme view of self-determination that permeates modern medicine, those who should have helped Passmore became morally paralyzed.”
Respecting autonomy more than life has the potential to harm people with disabilities.”
Time and inclusion have the power to heal even the deepest wounds.”
When we demand services that would help us to live in Liberty we are resisted at almost every turn. But if we ask to die, lawyers, doctors, bioethicists nd everyone else comes out of the woodwork and are more than happy to help.”
Surrogate decision making could endanger the lives of devalued people.”
Advocacy and education about advance directives are aimed at convincing people to refuse treatment. The standard form documents are often written to make it far easier to refuse treatment than request it.”
Substituted judgment standard vs Best Interest standard
The US is growing progressively pro-suicide. Today suicide is promoted widely as an acceptable answer to life’s most pressing difficulties.”
Many university and medical bioethics classes and professional articles and symposia claim that there are 2 kinds of suicide: those that should be prevented and those that should be respected, even facilitated to respect personal autonomy and avoid harming others by forcing suffering people to stay alive.”
Rational Suicide: many within these professional are working actively to dismantle society’s cultural revulsion against suicide and transform our attitudes toward self-killing into yet another issue of choice.”
Modern assisted suicide advocacy arose out of struggle to permit people to refuse unwanted life-extending medical treatment. Assisted suicide advocates hijacked the movement.
For months George Delury had coerced, cajoled, and pressured Myrna into killing herself.
Admitted that Myrna chose death for his sake. He withheld her full dosage of antidepressant medication from her so that he could stockpile the drugs for a lethal overdose. When the poison didn’t kill her, he smothered her with a plastic bag.”
Her moods fluctuated but they were dictated by the quality of care she was receiving.”
Such a value system not only reflects a distorted view of the worth of human life but also sends a lethal message to the weak and infirm: you are right, your life isn’t worth living.”
Assisted suicide is not the same thing as refusing medical treatment.
Pain control is not the same as assisted suicide.
Rita Marker: 1) action taken is good (2)bad effect must not be intended but only permitted (3) good effect cannot be brought about by means of the bad effect. (4) great reason to perform the act and risk bad effect
When morphine is properly used in the last hours of life, it eases anxiety and discomfort but does not hasten death.”
Assisted suicide would not be limited to people who are terminally ill.”
Many disabilities may be irreversible but not terminal.
1998: assisted suicide movement expanded mission to incurable illnesses which will eventually lead to a terminal diagnosis.
Guidelines will NOT protect against abuse. Euthanasia in the Netherlands is beyond effective control. People with emotional or mental problems who are not even physically ill but who want to die also have their deaths facilitated by doctors.
The prosecutor sees that this is not criminality in the normal sense. He is trying to create a precedent. He wants to make sure these things are done decently.
Dutch doctors each year kill 1000 people who have not asked to be euthanized because the doctors values dictate that their deaths should be hastened.”
Since 1980s, children can request euthanasia without parental consent. Dutch
The actual purpose of euthanasia guidelines is not to protect vulnerable people but to give false assurance and the appearance of control to the greater population.” They are mere expediences designed to induce the country to accept the concept of medical killing.”
Cheney went to a nursing home for a week so that her family could have some respite from care giving. The time in the nursing home seems to have pushed her into wanting immediate death; as soon as she was brought home she declares her desire to take the pills.”
Once killing is redefined from bad to good, the protective guidelines for assisted suicide are also redefined as obstacles to overcome. They are attacked, ignored, reinterpreted and potential violations go uninvestigated until they become irrelevant.”
The reasons for assisted suicide were worries about requiring assistance with daily living, fear of being unable to pursue enjoyable life activities.
A small but influential group of philosophers and health care policy makers are working energetically to transform our nation’s medical practice and health care laws.
Life’s Dominion Ronald Dworkin
James H Armstrong vs The State of Montana
Cutting-edge bioethics now holds that there is nothing special per se in being human and thus bioethicists have generall abandoned the sanctity of life ethic that proclaims the inherent moral worth of all people.”
The favored term for humans used by the movements advocates is Beings- a term that includes nonhumans.”
In our era, theory too easily becomes practice— non-persons can be killed, abandoned medically, experimented upon, or otherwise exploited as a natural resource.”
Desired medical treatment is refused in hospitals and nursing homes to patients who are dying or disabled.”
Futile Care Theory
Doctors, nurses and other staff pressure family members to permit their seriously brain damaged relatives (stroke, demented, cognitive disabilities) to be dehydrated to death by the removal of tube-supplied food and water.
Research animals enjoy greater legal protection under federal law than human subjects in medical experiments
Oregon legalized assisted suicide- called comfort care, pain control. The state denies curative treatments to late-stage cancer and very low birth weight babies.”
Parents of infant with Down syndrome and doctor intentionally allowed baby to starve to death. They were acquired of criminal wrongdoing.”
Popular culture promotes many of these practices as a compassionate response to the trials and tribulations of illness and a necessary adjustment to an obsolete, religiously based ethical system.
Reported instances of desperate patients in hospitals calling 911 because they were unable to get needed medical attention.”
The ethics of health care are devolving into stark utilitarianism, which has begun to undermine the do no harm credo that for millennia been the cornerstone of medicine.”
They urged the family to accept his quick death as the solution to his medical condition and to their own continuing emotional struggle. Withhold tube-supplies food and fluids.”
Because of the almost imperialistic view of their mandate, many bioethicists presume a moral expertise of breathtaking ambition and hubris.”
Bioethics seems to create a new morality of medicine that will define the meaning of health, determine when life loses its value, and forge the public policies that will promote a new medical and moral order.”
Bioethics by definition is a goal-oriented movement attempting to affect political outcomes.”
Many bioethicists believe fervently that there needs to be a radical transformation in how we live and how we think based on new biological knowledge because our values, our ethical principles, our self conception are based on outmoded religious or philosophical ideas that they think have been discredited.”
Dismantle traditional Western values and notes and forge a new ethical consensus based on values most people do not presently share.”
Thousands of ethicists and bioethicists professionally guide the unthinkable on its passage through the debatable on its way to becoming the justifiable, until it is finally established as the unexceptional.” Richard John Neuhaus.
Dehydrate cognitively disabled people to death by removing their feeding tubes. Routine practice in nursing homes and hospitals.”
Procure organs from people in coma.
The American people as a whole are a religiously affiliated or God believing people. There is a kind of condescension towards the views of the general public among bioethicists and a considerable divide about core moral views.”
The bioethics view has been taken over by a secular form of doing ethics that is very little informed by any kind of metaphysical or transcendent view.”
Bioethicists proclaim answers to questions based on attitudes, sensibilities, and notes that are not shared by the people who benefit from their moral expertise.”
Leon Kass: “There is a very real danger that what constitutes a meaningful life among the intellectual elite will be imposed on people as the only standard by which the value of human life is measured.”
Much of modern bioethics is subversive of this tradition of common morality. There is nothing in itself either valuable or inviolable, except utility.” John Keown
Radical utilitarian Joseph Fletcher created situational ethics which emphasize cutting loose from moral rules and view reasoned choice as basic to morality. Once he freed himself from moral rules Fletcher developed a worldview that was both anarchic and totalitarian.”
Paul Ramsey
Peter Singer
John Harris: it is not wrong to kill non-persons or fail to save their lives.
Baruch A. Brody
Once people are defined as organisms…is the key that allows us to exploit nonperson as if they weren’t people but merely natural resources.
Ronald Dworkin: killing the weak and helpless can actually be a method of upholding the inherent value of all human life.”
To assert that having an abortion is somehow to embrace the inviolability of every stage of every human life is simply ludicrous.
Dworkin asserts that euthanasia is not a rejection of the sanctity of human life but an embrace of it.
The death of an adolescent girl is worse than the death of an infant girl because the adolescent death frustrates the investment she and others have made in her life.”
Gilbert Meilander
Hippocratic oath is under attack for 20 years and is in acute danger of collapse.”
Once Hippocratic oath is weakened, bioethics began to replace it with medicine practiced for the greater good of the society rather than the individual patient.
Only 8% of doctors pledge to foreswear abortion. Only 14% of doctors promise not to commit euthanasia.”
The antipathy of relativist bioethics to religion emerged early.”
Bioethics now stresses that morality and proper behavior are best determined through rational analysis based on secular philosophical precepts.”
Many modern bioethicists are agnostic or atheist.
Bioethics is imposing a kind of ethics on a population that profoundly disagrees with its most basic assumptions.”
Dame Cicely Saunders and Tasmania
Modern Bioethics: utilitarian, quality of life ethic, Georgetown mantra.
To the utilitarian there is neither objective right or wrong: actions are measured subjectively based on desired or actual outcomes and on ends that justify the means.”
The Elimination of Morality Anne Maclean
Ethical ideals like individuals rights, the sanctity of life, Justice, purity, are incompatible with utilitarianism •
The problem with the concept of quality of life arises when it ceases to be a factor in medical decision making and instead becomes the factor.
We should treat human beings in accordance with their ethically relevant characteristics. They include: consciousness, capacity for physical, social, mental interaction, conscious preference for continued life, and relationship with others who would grieve.
Subjective notions of human worth are about raw power and who gets to do the judging.”
There is a great revolution against disabled people that is visceral. This disdain is masked as compassion.
There is nothing inherently wrong with the guidelines of the Georgetown Mantra but in the relativist context in which they exist, Unanchored in morality, these guidelines are entirely malleable and subject to manipulation in order to obtain a desired outcome.”
Once a patient is allowed to choose death, the caregiver does not have to impose treatment for fear of malpractice liability. The sense of tragedy connected with death and denial of treatment to the hopelessly ill can be mitigated.”
As to the abuses that would inevitably follow if his proposal were accepted, Funk shrugs and says “ the world is full of slippery slopes.”
They believe it is even a case of good riddance, since sanctity of life is archaic in a Darwinian world with too many people competing for too few resources.”
Striking and disturbing parallels exist between the manner in which eugenic theories were developed and put into practice. Like eugenics, bioethics creates hierarchies of human worth intended to justify medical discrimination.”
Francis Galton
Both eugenics and bioethics reject equal human moral worth. Both are utilitarian-based.
Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland: ethics of medicine are a good indicator of the moral health of society and when medical practice is corrupted, society is soon to follow.”
Because of eugenics theories, social Darwinist beliefs, and the deprivations caused by war, HALF of Germany’s mental patients were starved to death during WWI.”
Permission to Destroy Life Unworthy of Life.”
Binding and Hoche describes euthanasia as merely fulfilling the patients urgent wish(autonomy); defined killing ill and disabled people as a healing act (beneficence); promoted euthanasia as necessary to fulfill other urgent needs that were going wanting because of the cost of caring for disabled people (distributive Justice).
Between 1933-1945 German physicians did not take the Hippocratic Oath.”
The German medical establishment participated in the euthanasia Holocaust because they had convinced themselves that they were performing a healing service for the child, the family, and the Reich.”
Ernst Wetzler- infanticide; invented incubator
Because of public pressure, Hitler rescinded the T-4 program but not the infanticide directive.”
Doctors must never allow themselves to be seduced into accepting dual loyalties. The welfare of each individual patient must be the physicians unqualified concern•
Whatever proportions these crimes finally assumed, it became evident that they started from small beginnings. It started with acceptance of the attitude that there is such a thing as life not worthy to be lived.”
We have compartmentalization atrocities. There are substantial problems with researchers mindsets and inherent structural weaknesses in the system of check and balances that permit terrible abuses.”
If researchers deemed an infant’s potential for life to be of insufficient quality, his or her parents would be strongly advised against medical treatment.”
Subjects have been injected with drugs designed to exacerbate their delusions and hallucinations and/or have had effective medications withheld to see how quickly they became sick again.”
The trouble with IRB system is that they represent the research center more than they do human subjects. Most members are employees of the research center and reflect the culture of the research center.
By 1970s some of the worlds most respected doctors and philosophers began again to suggest openly that it should be ethical to kill disabled babies or neglect them to death.” James Watson, Francis Crick
Baby Jane Doe- neglected and killed (starvation, dehydration) by parents and doctors. Parents refused others to adopt her and wanted her dead.
Several of Arthur’s medical colleagues testified that such medical neglect of babies born with significant abnormalities is normal medical practice.”
Dr John Lorber: The wound should be left open. If an infection develops no antibiotics should be given. If excess fluid accumulated in the head this should not be drained. If babies did not eat and lost weight, they should not be tube-fed. Few is any would live longer than six months.”
Singer knows that it would not pay for him to discuss the killing of healthy babies and so he almost always addresses the issue in connection with disabled infants.”
Peter Singer is a child of German/Austrian Jews who lost family members in the Holocaust.
Whatever the supporting ideology, a murdered baby is a murdered baby.”
Baby Knauers doctors willingly murdered their patient at the request of his father.”
Jonathan Glover wrote that infanticide is not morally wrong because babies are replaceable.”
In Netherlands most of the killings were at the request of parents.
Physician assisted deaths for neonates is virtually never reported.”
The child was in agony primarily because she was neglected medically.”
If the infants prospects don’t measure up what the doctor and parents believe is a life worth living, the child can be medically neglected to death or if that doesn’t work, killed by the doctor via lethal injection.”
Most partial birth abortions occur after the 20th week, it is more accurate to call it premature labor, followed by a partial delivery, and then killing of the almost-born child.”
Causing death by dehydration and starvation to cognitively disabled people is legal in all 50 states.
Defining artificial nutrition as a treatment instead of humane care was a crucial step in the development of the culture of death.”
Early 1980s some bioethicists began to wonder whether disabled frail elderly people were living too long.
Danial Callahan: a denial of nutrition may be the only effective way to make certain that a large number of biologically tenacious individuals actually die.”
Paul Ramsey: when a patient is actively dying and can no longer assimilate food and water, then it is humane to desist from providing such care.”
Fred Rosner: for physicians to remove food and fluids attacks the very foundation of medicine as a profession. Food and fluids do not become medical therapy just because another person is needed to provide them.”
The advocacy of bioethicists profoundly influenced court decisions and legislation on the issue of removing food and fluids from people in PVS.
Nancy Cruzan
The sparse testimony was all the judge needed to rationalize doing what he wanted to do all along.”
It took only 10 years from the beginning of the bioethics debate about dehydration for people with PVS to be viewed as objects, vegetables, mere biological life; a disposable caste whose intentional killing is proper and compassionate.”
Maria Lidia Lopez
Marjorie Nighbert
If we are to err…we must err in preserving life.
Death by dehydration takes 10-14 days. It is an extremely agonizing death.”
The patient would not require strong drugs to palliative suffering except for being denied the basic humane provision of food and water.”
Robert Wendland
With much money to be made by keeping people going, it is not altogether surprising that some patients were treated as mere commodities in a way that assaulted their human dignity.”
The process of dying needs to be got out of the hospitals and back into the home and in the midst of family, neighborhood, and friends.
The sting of dying is solitude. Desertion is more choking than death and more feared. The chief problem of the dying is how not to die alone.”
The intense emphasis placed on autonomy by bioethics training has made it far easier for health care professionals to accede to requests to terminate life-saving care made by vulnerable, depressed people in their darkest hours.”
Elizabeth Bouvia: what Bouvia really needed at the time of her profound emotional crisis was not cold autonomy but intervention and sufficient time to recover her equilibrium.”
Her attorney (Hemlock Society) is the one who ultimately committed suicide.”
Because of the increasingly extreme view of self-determination that permeates modern medicine, those who should have helped Passmore became morally paralyzed.”
Respecting autonomy more than life has the potential to harm people with disabilities.”
Time and inclusion have the power to heal even the deepest wounds.”
When we demand services that would help us to live in Liberty we are resisted at almost every turn. But if we ask to die, lawyers, doctors, bioethicists nd everyone else comes out of the woodwork and are more than happy to help.”
Surrogate decision making could endanger the lives of devalued people.”
Advocacy and education about advance directives are aimed at convincing people to refuse treatment. The standard form documents are often written to make it far easier to refuse treatment than request it.”
Substituted judgment standard vs Best Interest standard
The US is growing progressively pro-suicide. Today suicide is promoted widely as an acceptable answer to life’s most pressing difficulties.”
Many university and medical bioethics classes and professional articles and symposia claim that there are 2 kinds of suicide: those that should be prevented and those that should be respected, even facilitated to respect personal autonomy and avoid harming others by forcing suffering people to stay alive.”
Rational Suicide: many within these professional are working actively to dismantle society’s cultural revulsion against suicide and transform our attitudes toward self-killing into yet another issue of choice.”
Modern assisted suicide advocacy arose out of struggle to permit people to refuse unwanted life-extending medical treatment. Assisted suicide advocates hijacked the movement.
For months George Delury had coerced, cajoled, and pressured Myrna into killing herself.
Admitted that Myrna chose death for his sake. He withheld her full dosage of antidepressant medication from her so that he could stockpile the drugs for a lethal overdose. When the poison didn’t kill her, he smothered her with a plastic bag.”
Her moods fluctuated but they were dictated by the quality of care she was receiving.”
Such a value system not only reflects a distorted view of the worth of human life but also sends a lethal message to the weak and infirm: you are right, your life isn’t worth living.”
Assisted suicide is not the same thing as refusing medical treatment.
Pain control is not the same as assisted suicide.
Rita Marker: 1) action taken is good (2)bad effect must not be intended but only permitted (3) good effect cannot be brought about by means of the bad effect. (4) great reason to perform the act and risk bad effect
When morphine is properly used in the last hours of life, it eases anxiety and discomfort but does not hasten death.”
Assisted suicide would not be limited to people who are terminally ill.”
Many disabilities may be irreversible but not terminal.
1998: assisted suicide movement expanded mission to incurable illnesses which will eventually lead to a terminal diagnosis.
Guidelines will NOT protect against abuse. Euthanasia in the Netherlands is beyond effective control. People with emotional or mental problems who are not even physically ill but who want to die also have their deaths facilitated by doctors.
The prosecutor sees that this is not criminality in the normal sense. He is trying to create a precedent. He wants to make sure these things are done decently.
Dutch doctors each year kill 1000 people who have not asked to be euthanized because the doctors values dictate that their deaths should be hastened.”
Since 1980s, children can request euthanasia without parental consent. Dutch
The actual purpose of euthanasia guidelines is not to protect vulnerable people but to give false assurance and the appearance of control to the greater population.” They are mere expediences designed to induce the country to accept the concept of medical killing.”
Cheney went to a nursing home for a week so that her family could have some respite from care giving. The time in the nursing home seems to have pushed her into wanting immediate death; as soon as she was brought home she declares her desire to take the pills.”
Once killing is redefined from bad to good, the protective guidelines for assisted suicide are also redefined as obstacles to overcome. They are attacked, ignored, reinterpreted and potential violations go uninvestigated until they become irrelevant.”
The reasons for assisted suicide were worries about requiring assistance with daily living, fear of being unable to pursue enjoyable life activities.
Did Not Finish
December 18, 2024I ended up abandoning this book😬 I wanted to read about bioethics and I just wasn’t vibing with author’s style. I didn’t make it terribly far so I didn’t want to rate the book. Just not for me.
September 19, 2010
at the risk of being reported...i'd read that piece by michelle malkin about health care...at the risk of being reported, this is a must read for anyone concerned about their health or the health of their loved ones.
January 5, 2013
This is a book that truly should be read by all. Scary to watch what is becoming the way of thinking among our medical professionals, makes you think what choices you would make.
September 10, 2010
This was a very deep and difficult book to read. The subject matter covers abortion, assisted suicide, euthanasia, medical research and other ethical issues. To say that I was shocked by the information presented by the author would be an understatement. The fact that it was written over ten years ago makes me wonder how much worse it has gotten in America! We need to take medicine back from the insurance companies, the immoral bioethicists and the greedy hospital administrators. We should be using our medical knowledge and equipment to help those who are suffering, not to hurt those with severe medical issues. Wake-up America, before someone tries to use this skewed, immoral logic to keep treatment from you or end your life. I encourage everyone to read this book. While it may be difficult at times, we need to know what is happening in the world of medical ethics.
December 23, 2011
While "ethics" is a generic term for various ways of understanding and examining the moral life, the term "bioethics" is broader in scope and encompasses biological sciences, medicine and healthcare. It is a relatively new field of philosophical study, being only thirty years old or so. Smith outlines the problems with modern bioethics including the futile care theory and questions of morality relating to testing on humans and euthanasia.
The biggest issue seems to be that many bioethicists are postmodernists and, as such, have no real foundation on which to build ethical principles. Smith touches on Pete Singer, who argues that human life is worth less than animal life. Paul Copan, in his book "How Do You Know You're Not Wrong?" demolishes Singer's ideas, and Singer fares no better here. This is an excellent book for anyone interested in philosophy or critical thinking.
The biggest issue seems to be that many bioethicists are postmodernists and, as such, have no real foundation on which to build ethical principles. Smith touches on Pete Singer, who argues that human life is worth less than animal life. Paul Copan, in his book "How Do You Know You're Not Wrong?" demolishes Singer's ideas, and Singer fares no better here. This is an excellent book for anyone interested in philosophy or critical thinking.
Read
September 11, 2011It has been a couple of years since I last read Culture of Death; I'll update this review once I've re-familiarized myself with it.
For now, just want to add something that's absent from existing reviews: this influential survey of issues in bioethics has an obvious conservative lilt. (For context, Smith is currently a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute.) Compelling read; not objective.
For now, just want to add something that's absent from existing reviews: this influential survey of issues in bioethics has an obvious conservative lilt. (For context, Smith is currently a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute.) Compelling read; not objective.
June 30, 2015
Interesting that he doesn't consider abortion murder.....
January 7, 2009
Very eye-opening.
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