Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, director of the Clinical Bioethics Department of the U.S. National Institute of Health and head of the Department of Medical Ethics at the University of Pennsylvania, has been a longtime cheerleader for Obama’s leftist policies, including ObamaCare, which he helped write.
In a recent article in the Atlantic, “Why I Hope to Die at 75” the good doctor cited various reasons and statistics to convince us that living beyond 75 was selfish and unpatriotic. Kicking Off at 75 would not only spare the government the cost of your health care but would spare your family the suffering of watching you die from natural causes at a later date. Bless his heart, he’s special!
According to Ezekiel, modern medicine hasn’t slowed the aging process so much as it has slowed the dying process. Although he’s against doctor assisted suicide and euthanasia, Ezekiel does have a solution for the “manic desperation” to endlessly extend life – Refuse medical tests and health care and let death takes its natural course. Notice he didn’t say government should exclude you from health care because that would be euthanasia, and he’s against euthanasia.
Yet in 1996 in an article published in the Hastings Center Report, Emanuel advises that under certain conditions where the free market (for profit) health care limited resources he favors a “two-tiered health system where some would receive only basic services while others would receive basic and discretionary services. Basic services would however, not be guaranteed to patients who are prevented from becoming “participating citizens.” Within the discretionary tier Dr. Emanuel notes that some will receive a few discretionary services while the rich would receive almost all available services.
In the Principles for Allocation of Scarce Medical Intervention, authors Ezekiel Emanuel, Govind Persal and Alan Wertheimer, presented their arguments for discriminating against the very young and the elderly. In a plan they call the “Complete Lives System” that “satisfies” all ethical requirements to allocation of health care, they offer their 5 tier program which produces a priority curve on which individuals aged between roughly 15 and 40 get the most substantial chance at survival. Screw the rest of us!
Under the Complete Lives System, which they refer to as “distributive justice,” it would be ethical to withhold medical care from babies, toddlers and young children which do not have a substantial societal investment that would be wasted should they die and any young person with a poor prognosis that lacks the potential for a complete life. The potential for a complete life also applies to everyone, regardless of age but the higher the age, the less value you have to society. Sounds a lot like euthanasia to me!
Euthanasia as a means of ridding the world of undesirables and reducing the world’s population is also defined as intentionally, knowingly and directly acting to cause the death of another person. It has been an intrinsic part of the progressive movement from its inception. Better breeding would ride the world of disease, mental illness, criminals, alcoholics, paupers, and “negative eugenics” would single out and eliminate the unfit, the disabled, the undesirables.
The movement had many famous followers such as Margaret Sanger, J.P. Morgan, the DuPont and the Rockefeller families, Charles Darwin,Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, John Kellogg, etc. It was only after the horrors of the Holocaust that the eugenic movement went underground and reinvented itself.
Planned Parenthood founded by Margret Sanger and funded by the Rockefeller family was specifically promoted for its benefit as a method of eugenics. Margaret Sanger is still listed at the Smithsonian as a “Woman of Valor” even though her plan of population control was clearly an attempt to rid the world of the black race.
David DeGrazia, tenured at George Washington University, recently advocated for creating a master race via programmatic “moral bioenhancement” in the Journal of Medical Ethics. Julian Savulescu, tenured at St. Cross College, Oxford, editor of the Journal of Medical Ethics, is a self-appointed champion of genetic tinkering and the face of the new eugenic movement. In a recent article Savulescu claimed that it is “our duty” to have designer babies and that “people have a moral obligation to select ethically better children.”
Abortion for sex selection is part of the new eugenics movement. The Manhattan-based Center For Human Reproduction tells pregnant women they may want to abort if they are concerned about diseases. Academic philosophers Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva say kill ‘em while they’re still infants, “after-birth abortion” should be legal. The subtitle of their 2012 JME paper is “Why should the baby live?” Their argument? The “moral status of an infant is equivalent to that of a fetus in the sense that both lack those properties that justify the attribution of a right to life to an individual.”
And let’s now forget the call from the wealthy elite of today for population control and extreme environmentalist laws, all part of the eugenics movement. Margaret Sanger would be proud!
sources: Why I Hope to Die at 75 by Ezekiel Emanuel, The Atlantic The Return of Eugenics by William Briggs, Crisis Mag.; Principles for Allocation of Scarce Medical Intervention
