LIFE DIGEST: Schiavo death rated decade’s top bioethics story

By Tom Strode - Jan 12, 2010 - 1 -

The 2005 dehydration death of Terri Schiavo was “hands down” the most important bioethics story in the last decade, a specialist in the field says.

Writing at National Review Online, pro-life bioethics commentator Wesley Smith ranked the top 10 stories in the field from 2000 through 2009.

Also in this edition: California doctor ordered not to perform abortions and Navy officer charged in death of pregnant woman.

Schiavo was the 41-year-old Florida woman who received a “persistent vegetative state” diagnosis and died when food and water were withheld from her at the request of her husband, Michael, and over the opposition of her parents after a lengthy legal battle.

“Who hasn’t heard her name? Who doesn’t have an opinion about what happened?” Smith wrote. The Schiavo case, he said, “was far more than a personal and family tragedy: It was a modern-day passion play from which we are still reeling.

“With Terri dead and buried, and with majority poll support, some of the most notable voices within bioethics and transplant medicine openly argue that persistently unconscious patients should, with consent of family, have their organs harvested – which results in death – or be used in research as if they were actually dead,” Smith wrote. “And with Obamacare coming full throttle, the question of whether the expenses required to care for these most helpless patients will continue to be borne has become a subject of acute bioethical attention.”

Here is the rest of Smith’s top 10 in descending order: (2) President Bush’s 2001 restriction on federal funding of stem cell research that destroys human embryos; (3) the “anarchy” of the virtually unregulated field of in vitro fertilization; (4) Switzerland’s assisted-suicide “tourism” industry for people from other countries; (5) the successful treatments produced by adult stem cell research; (6) the state of Washington’s legalization of assisted suicide in 2008; (7) the fight over health-care reform in 2009; (8) the increase in pro-life public opinion; (9) the spread of “biological colonialism, and (10) the rise in an “anti-human environmentalism.”

Smith said the “signals are mixed” regarding what these events say about human beings and society.

“First, we are in danger of supplanting human exceptionalism – belief in the intrinsic dignity and equality of human life – with a ‘quality-of-life ethic’ in which some of us are deemed to matter more than others,” he wrote. “But the path to such a brave new world is proving to be neither straight nor unimpeded. Indeed, there are encouraging signs the sanctity of life could make a comeback.”

California doctor ordered not to perform abortions

A California judge has ordered a doctor to stop doing abortions after a woman died during his performance of such a procedure on her.

At a Jan. 7 hearing in San Diego, Administrative Law Judge James Ahler directed Andrew Rutland to stop performing abortions and delivering babies but did not suspend his medical license, the Los Angeles Times reported. A formal disciplinary hearing will be held on Rutland’s actions during the case that resulted in the woman’s death.

Ying Chen, 30, died during a second-trimester abortion in August at a clinic in San Gabriel, Calif., according to the Times. Rutland “committed repeated negligent acts in his care and treatment of the patient” during the procedure, California Deputy Attorney General Douglas Lee said at the hearing. The doctor did not have the equipment or assistance needed when she suffered a toxic reaction to a drug, Lee said, the Times reported.

At the time of her death, Rutland was on five years’ administrative probation after losing his medical license. He had surrendered his license following the deaths of two babies shortly after he delivered them, according to the Times. His license was reinstated later.

A Navy petty officer stationed in Pensacola, Fla., has been charged with first-degree premeditated murder of a woman who supposedly was carrying his child and refused to have an abortion.

Zachary Littleton, 25, was indicted in the death of Samira Watkins, also 25, of Pensacola. Homicide investigators believe Littleton, who is married and has a child, wanted Watkins to abort the unborn child they believe he was the father of, according to the Pensacola News-Journal.

Watkins’ family last saw her alive Oct. 29. Her body was found Nov. 3 washed up on the shore of a bayou in Pensacola.

Littleton is scheduled for a Jan. 15 bond hearing.

The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission works to protect the sanctity of human life. If you would like to learn more about this issue, additional resources are available here. Our free, downloadable Impact resource is also available online. If your church is interested in purchasing materials on the sanctity of human life, please visit our online bookstore and erlc.com.

Further Learning

Learn more about: Life, Abortion, End-of-Life Issues, Citizenship, Science, Bioethics

comments

1 On Jan 17th, 2010, at 1:44pm, Alice Hersman wrote:

I have always found it interesting that all people who are for abortion have already been born.

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