//Emanuel also addressed the social aspects that come along with an increase in longevity. Longer lives mean that children end up caring for their parents for extended periods of time, possibly creating some social and familial issues in the process.
“Living parents also occupy the role of head of the family. They make it hard for grown children to become the patriarch or matriarch. When parents routinely live to 95, children must caretake into their own retirement,” Emanuel wrote. “That doesn’t leave them much time on their own — and it is all old age. When parents live to 75, children have had the joys of a rich relationship with their parents, but also have enough time for their own lives, out of their parents’ shadows.”
As for his own health, Emanuel, 57, said he plans to stop taking major efforts to prolong it once he inches toward the 75 mark.
At 65, he said he’ll stop having colonoscopies and, at 75, he said he will refuse treatment if he falls ill with cancer; he’ll also stop having stress tests, will refuse pacemakers, won’t have reparative heart surgery — and will even stop taking antibiotics.
“At 75 and beyond, I will need a good reason to even visit the doctor and take any medical test or treatment, no matter how routine and painless,” he said. “And that good reason is not ‘It will prolong your life.’”
Emanuel, a well-respected doctor whose views on health and patient care have been scrutinized by some critics, was careful to note that he isn’t judging those who wish to live as long as possible and that he, as a physical, has regularly helped the elderly find resources that enable them to do so.//
//We have here a peculiar inversion of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. In the novel, a self-diagnosis of insanity demonstrated sanity; in Van Den Bleeken’s case, though he was declared insane and therefore not responsible for his actions, his wish to kill himself is somehow seen as sensible and reasoned. This is despite the fact that he himself argues that he is too mentally ill ever to be freed from prison. Carine Brochier, a project manager with the Brussels-based European Institute of Bioethics, is surely right to say that if the original sentence was correct, Van Den Bleeken should not be allowed to die but should instead receive proper treatment.
Of course, some might think ‘good riddance’. It is very difficult to sympathise with Van Den Bleeken’s existential angst or his whining about his ‘inhumane’ treatment. He is a prisoner because he committed horrific crimes. His feelings were not pre-eminent when he was tried and sentenced; nor should they be now. The sisters of one of Van Den Bleeken’s victims, a woman he raped and killed while being temporarily out of prison in 1989, seemed appalled by the decision. ‘Let him rot in his cell’, the sisters told Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad. What does it say about the Belgian justice system when prisoners may singlehandedly overturn the will of parliament, which has decided that particular sentences fit particular crimes?
The motivation behind supporting Van Den Bleeken is ostensibly compassion, but the outcome of Belgium’s liberal experiment is death on demand – for anyone, and for any reason. Even if you’re clinically insane! Because once you admit that death is an appropriate treatment for some, how can you deny it to others? Jaqueline Herremans, president of Belgium’s right-to-die association and government-appointed member of Belgium’s euthanasia commission, said of Van Den Bleeken’s request: ‘Regardless, he’s a human being; a human being who has the right to demand euthanasia.’ So slippery is the slope, it seems, that euthanasia has become a right to be extended to all human beings.//
I’m still shaking my head at Wendy Davis — not that she lied about her biography (sometimes it seems as if every politician springs out of some kind of heroic narrative) — but that she, as a very young lawyer doing the simple, ordinary work that thousands of young lawyers do, conceded custody of her child on the grounds that “it’s not a good time for me right now” to be the custodial parent.
I’m also shaking my head at the president of the United States, speaking on the anniversary of the legalized killing of tens of millions of children, justifying this slaughter because it gives the former parents the ability to “fulfill their dreams.”
Our nation is awash in important people doing important things. We’ve got our TED Talkers, our policy wonks, our “masters of the universe” financiers, our Silicon Valley wiz kids, our athletes, our politicians (and their staffs), our actors — all of them running around thinking of themselves as “kind of a big deal.” The rest of us? Well, we can Lean In and be a big deal too.
Mrs. Keller's bizarre issues with Adams alone are not worthy of note, but it was when Keller's husband, former New York Times editor Bill Keller, dove into the controversy that things got interesting.
On the pages of the Sunday Times Keller reveals a monstrous philosophy that in so many ways is revealing of the elite left as a whole -- especially as it pertains to ObamaCare. In so many words, Keller just can't bring himself to understand why Adams doesn't give up her fight and die. In his mind, her death is inevitable and all she's doing is spending a lot of money that could be better spent elsewhere:
In October 2012 I wrote about my father-in-law’s death from cancer in a British hospital. There, more routinely than in the United States, patients are offered the option of being unplugged from everything except pain killers and allowed to slip peacefully from life. His death seemed to me a humane and honorable alternative to the frantic medical trench warfare that often makes an expensive misery of death in America.
Among doctors here, there is a growing appreciation of palliative care that favors the quality of the remaining life rather than endless “heroic measures” that may or may not prolong life but assure the final days are clamorous, tense and painful. (And they often leave survivors bankrupt.) What Britain and other countries know, and my country is learning, is that every cancer need not be Verdun, a war of attrition waged regardless of the cost or the casualties. It seemed to me, and still does, that there is something enviable about going gently. One intriguing lung cancer study even suggests that patients given early palliative care instead of the most aggressive chemotherapy not only have a better quality of life, they actually live a bit longer.
Keller's primary fear seems to be that Adams will serve as an example to others to never give up -- to keep spending someone's inheritance or The State's money as opposed to dying with dignity like a good little socialist. This is how Keller closes the column:
Steven Goodman, an associate dean of the Stanford University School of Medicine, said he cringes at the combat metaphor, because it suggests that those who choose not to spend their final days in battle, using every weapon in the high-tech medical arsenal, lack character or willpower.This all seems to stem from the left's horrific view of humans as a biological accident, and life as nothing more than utilitarian, as opposed to something sacred.
“I’m the last person to second-guess what she did,” Goodman told me, after perusing Adams’s blog. “I’m sure it has brought meaning, a deserved sense of accomplishment. But it shouldn’t be unduly praised. Equal praise is due to those who accept an inevitable fate with grace and courage.”
For a contrast between Christian light & diabolical darkness, watch these scenes in Argentina as Catholics peacefully defend the Cathedral of San Juan against pro-abortion protestors, who then spit on them, perform sexual acts in front of them, and otherwise abuse them revoltingly (CAVEAT: explicit scenes):
If anything shows the neo-pagan evil at the heart of the culture of death, the behaviour showed here does. Astonishing. And sadly, nothing new...
And then there is this (facetious) petition-drive for "Fourth Trimester Abortions":Today Natural News denounces Melissa Harris-Perry, the latest talking head “death worshipper” to publicly imply that she supports the murder of living, breathing newborn children. According to Harris-Perry, life begins when the parents feel like life begins. And together with some twisted new “ethics” arguments from the radical left, this can include months or years after a child is born.That’s why I need to premise this article with a disclaimer: This article is not about abortion. It’s about the murder of children after they are born. Because once a child is born alive, terminating that life is no longer a “choice” … it’s murder by every legal and moral standard. Because while abortion friends and foes can argue about when life begins in the womb, no one disagrees that a child born alive is, well, ALIVE… do they?Indeed, they do. MSNBC talking head Melissa Harris-Perry insists that life only begins when the parents have a “feeling” that it begins. “When does life begin? I submit the answer depends an awful lot on the feeling of the parents. A powerful feeling — but not science,” Harris-Perry said to nationwide astonishment on her July 21 MSNBC show.And in one stroke, she simultaneously condones the murder of newborn infants (i.e. “post-birth abortion”) while attacking the science of biology which unambiguously states that a living, breathing infant with a heartbeat and brain function is alive, not dead.But don’t tell that to the radical abortion whackos. Far beyond arguing for the “right” to abort a baby in the first or second trimester, many abortion advocates who run in the same circles as Melissa Harris-Perry are now publicly arguing that it is okay for parents to kill their children up to age three. This is now being promoted as a “post-birth abortion.”
//You see his father was extremely ill, and Adams wanted to kill him — but couldn’t under the law. So, he hates us for “torturing” his father. From his blog, “I Hope My Father Dies Soon”:"Let me say this next part as clearly as I can. If you’re a politician who has ever voted against doctor-assisted suicide, or you would vote against it in the future, I hate your [f-word] guts and I would like you to die a long, horrible death. I would be happy to kill you personally and watch you bleed out. I won’t do that, because I fear the consequences. But I’d enjoy it, because you mother[f-word] are responsible for torturing my father…I’m okay with any citizen who opposes doctor-assisted suicide on moral or practical grounds. But if you have acted on that thought, such as basing a vote on it, I would like you to die a slow, horrible death too. You and the government are accomplices in the torturing of my father, and there’s a good chance you’ll someday be accomplices in torturing me to death too."
Child euthanasia: It’s all over but the final voting in Belgium as the Parliament agrees across party lines that doctors should be able to euthanize children. From the Presseurop story:
Treating a child like a sick horse is what passes for “compassion” these days.In the wake of several months of testimony from doctors and experts in medical ethics, a Belgian Senate committee will on June 12 examine the possible extension of the country’s euthanasia law to include children. “On both sides of the linguistic border, liberals and socialists appear to agree on the fact that age should not be regarded as a decisive criteria in the event of a request for euthanasia,”De Morgen. They want doctors to decide on a minor’s capacity for discernment on a case by case basis.
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