The editor of the New England Journal of Medicine took to its pages last week to castigate the Center for Medical Progress for picking on poor Planned Parenthood.
Boo hoo. Jeffrey Drazen doesn’t rebut the tapes’ contents, just asserts PP is ethical–as if his and their claim make it so.
But that brings up another issue. Why are the medical and bioethics elites generally silent in the face of clear evidence that Planned Parenthood changes the way it dismembers fetuses to gain intact organs?
It’s the philosophy. Elsewhere, I point out that the leading view in bioethics doesn’t necessarily accept the moral relevance of human life. Rather, what counts to many of this ilk, is being considered a “person.” From, “Our Utilitarian Medical Elite:”
The field’s predominant view endorses a discriminatory approach to valuing life (human or animal) based on each individual’s cognitive capacities. In this view, those who are demonstrably self-aware or able to value their own lives are deemed “persons.” Those insufficiently mature—embryos, fetuses, infants—or who have lost their mental capacities owing to illness or injury (such as Terri Schiavo or Alzheimer’s patients) are effectively “nonpersons,” deemed to have lesser moral worth than the rest of us.
This isn’t like arguing about heads of pins and the size of angels. Under the dominant strain of bioethics, nonpersons have no right to life. Access to abortion is not just about protecting a woman’s right to do what she pleases with her own body, although that is part of it. Abortion is also morally acceptable because the fetus is not deemed to be a person. For many in the field, this means that infanticide should also be permitted—and for the same reasons as abortion.
I discuss the pro-infanticide article published to great controversy a few years ago in the Journal of Medical Ethics (as just one example), and describe how some of these same voices that accept both abortion and infanticide as morally equivalent, also argue that people like Terri Schiavo should be killable for their organs–because, like the unborn and infants, they are ”persons.”
I conclude:
Now we can see why those who presume to possess the greatest ethical expertise in the biomedical fields are not leading the charge against Planned Parenthood’s crass attitudes toward the dismemberment of fetuses to obtain sellable parts. It is a very short journey from considering babies—whether unborn or born—to be an inferior stage of human life to believing they have no rights that fully developed persons are bound to respect.
The problem here, is rather simple–and certainly not limited to issues involving abortion in specific or healthcare in general: The leaders of our most important institutions think differently than those whose interests they claim to champion.
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/423932/why-medical-elite-support-planned-parenthood-wesley-j-smith
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