• In New York, a man who smothered his wife with a plastic bag after her purported assisted suicide attempt failed, and who then covered up the crime with a falsified death certificate and a quick cremation, was given a mere two-week jail sentence.
• In Canada, Robert Latimer was convicted of murdering his twelve-year-old daughter by asphyxiation because she had cerebral palsy. Instead of receiving significant punishment, he was embraced by a majority of Canadians as a “loving father,” resulting in his “mandatory” ten-year sentence being reduced to one year by a judge who labeled the girl’s murder “altruistic.” Latimer remains free on appeal nearly ten years after his daughter’s killing.
• In England, the parents of an infant born with Down syndrome and the treating doctor who intentionally allowed the baby to starve to death were acquitted of all criminal wrongdoing.
• In the United States, the requirements of the Nuremberg Code to protect human beings in medical experiments are routinely violated without legal consequence. Indeed, thanks to the advocacy of “animal rights” activists, animals often receive greater protection in medical research than do people.
This growing indifference to the value of human life within the health care system and courts should be big news. Yet most people are but dimly aware of what is happening. There are several reasons for this. Popular culture promotes many of these practices as a positive, thereby camouflaging the evil that is taking place. Nonjudgmentalism reigns supreme as the growing relativism of our culture increasingly incapacitates people from “imposing their own beliefs on others” by making well-honed moral judgments. The mainstream media neither cover these important issues adequately (or sometimes even at all) nor place them in a proper and understandable context when they do. Thus, while stories involving death culture issues sometimes make the news, they are generally covered as if they have occurred in isolation. The overarching themes that would alert the populace to the bigger picture are generally ignored, and the dots remain unconnected. In this sense, we are like the proverbial frog slowly being boiled to death, unaware that the water is getting hot and that destruction is fast approaching.
A prime purpose of this book is to cast a bright light on the rising steam of the not-yet-boiling pot. Also, by focusing greater attention on the culture of death, I hope to help lead our society away from the immoral path we are on and toward a more profound commitment to the sanctity of human life, not necessarily in the spiritual sense but as a societal commitment that each and every one of us are moral equals. Just as we should not discriminate against each other on the basis of race, religion, nationality, or gender, neither should we cast aside people in the health care system because they are disabled, elderly, brain-damaged, or dying, these latter forms of invidious discrimination being mainstays of the culture of death movement.
Although I quote many philosophy treatises, this is not a philosophy book. And while I explore many laws and ethics protocols, this book does not get bogged down in specific policy proposals. Nor, I hasten to add, am I under the illusion that I can change the minds of the inbred denizens of the ivory tower who move bioethics forward in their never-ending discourse in academic journals and books, and at symposia; most are far too committed to their cause for that. Rather, this is a book primarily about how bad ideas lead to harmful consequences that hurt real people, inviting the people of the general public into the important debates that are already occurring beneath—or, better stated, above—the radar, debates that will not only determine the future of their health care but also the very morality of the society their children will inherit.
One last note before we get under way. In these pages, I take no position on whether abortion should be legal or illegal. I know this will frustrate some of my readers, but I am convinced it is the right thing to do to best accomplish my objectives. Abortion is the black hole of public discourse from which little light escapes. Were I to discuss the issue in depth, any publicity this book eventually receives would likely focus on that issue and divert attention away from the many important bioethics policies upon which this book seeks to shine the bright light. Moreover, many articulate and thoughtful voices already address abortion from both sides of the issue, and nothing I have to say would add substantially to that which has already been written. Finally, Roe v. Wade has settled for the foreseeable future whether abortion will or will not be a legal right. Thus anything I might write, either for or against abortion, would be quite superfluous and beside the point of what I hope to achieve in this writing.
That is not to say that Roe v. Wade is irrelevant. In a way, this book can be said to begin at the exact point where Roe leaves off. The people endangered by the culture of death policies about which I write (e.g., born people) are protected under Roe v. Wade but endangered by policies and protocols with which this book is filled. Indeed, whether one is pro-life or pro-choice, it is my sincere hope that the book’s readers will agree with me that, regarding born people, each and every one of us should be treated as an unqualified equal in the health care system. None of us is expendable. No one should be abandoned to death because he or she fails to pass the muster established by the few elite academics and philosophers who, for the last thirty years, have taken upon themselves the power to decide when a life is not worthy to be lived.
WESLEY J. SMITH
Oakland, California
March 2000
“My mother’s doctor is refusing to give her antibiotics,” the woman caller told me in an urgent voice.
“Why is he refusing to prescribe antibiotics?” I asked.
“He says that she’s ninety-two and an infection will kill her sooner or later. So it might as well be this infection.”
As disturbing as this call was, as outrageous the doctor’s behavior, I wasn’t particularly surprised. I have been receiving such desperate communications with increasing frequency for the past two decades. Not every day, not every week, but with sufficient regularity—increasing in volume since this book was originally published—to become very alarmed about the state and ethics of American medicine, and its impact on culture.
Among the more disturbing calls I received came from John Campbell, whose teenage son, Christopher, had been unconscious for three weeks because of brain damage sustained in an auto accident. The boy had just been released from the hospital intensive care unit when he developed a 105-degree fever in the hospital’s “step-down unit.” Campbell asked the nurses to cool his fever. They replied that they needed a doctor’s orders. Campbell asked them to obtain it, but Christopher’s physician was out of town and the on-call doctor said no. “It was an evening of hell,” Campbell says. “My son’s life meant less than hospital protocol. When the doctor refused to order treatment, the nurses said that there was nothing they could do.”
Campbell desperately tried to reach the doctor on call personally, but he refused to take Campbell’s phone calls or return his increasingly urgent messages. Meanwhile, Christopher’s condition worsened steadily, rising over a period of some twenty hours, to 107.6 degrees. Finally, the nurses, caught between a desperate father’s pleas and a doctor’s steadfast refusal to treat, put Campbell on the phone directly with the doctor.
Campbell demanded that his son’s fever be treated immediately. The doctor refused. When Campbell grew more insistent, the doctor actually laughed. The boy was unconscious. His life was effectively over. What was the point?
“By this time,” Campbell recalls with much emotion, “my son’s eyes were black, as if he had been in a fight. He was utterly still. He was burning up. The back of his neck was so hot you couldn’t keep your hand on it. I said to the doctor, ‘This is not a joke! This is my son.