Rush Limbaugh Features Wesley Smith

This transcript is from an interview with Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Wesley Smith on The Rush Limbaugh Show:

Direct Transcript From the March 29, 2005 Rush Limbaugh radio program:

RUSH: I went ahead and printed out this piece by Wesley Smith at National Review Online. He is a senior fellow, which means he’s a scholar like me, at an Institute. That’s why I sit in the prestigious Attila the Hun Chair. Institutes have chairs where the scholars sit and think, and that’s what Wesley Smith is. He’s a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute. He’s an attorney for the International Task Force on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide and a specialty consultant to the Center for Bioethics and culture, and he had I guess a debate with a Florida bioethicist named Bill Allen at Court TV Online. And as he writes today, I’m going to cut down to the nitty-gritty: “Bill, do you think Terri is a person?” Bill Allen: “No, I do not. I think having awareness is an essential criterion for personhood. Even minimal awareness would support some criterion of personhood, but I don’t think complete absence of awareness does.” Mr. Smith then writes, “If you want to know how it became acceptable to remove tube-supplied food and water from people with profound cognitive disabilities, this exchange brings you to the nub of the Schiavo case — the ‘first principle,’ if you will. Bluntly stated, most bioethicists do not believe that membership in the human species accords any of us intrinsic moral worth. Rather, what matters is whether ‘a being’ or ‘an organism,’ or even a machine, is a ‘person,’ a status achieved by having sufficient cognitive capacities. Those who don’t measure up are denigrated as ‘non-persons.'”

Another question: Bill, “If Terri is not a person, should her organs be procured with consent?” Bill Allen, bioethicist: “‘…Yes, I think there should be consent to harvest her organs, just as we allow people to say what they want done with their assets.’ Put that in your hat and ponder it for a moment: If organ harvesting from the cognitively devastated were legal today, Michael Schiavo would be the one, no doubt sanctioned by Judge Greer, who could consent to doctors’ ‘stopping’ Terri’s heart and harvesting her organs. Think that’s a horrid thought? Well, ponder this: More than ten years ago, transplant-medicine ethicists Robert M. Arnold and Stuart J. Youngner painted a disturbing picture of the kind of society that the bioethics movement is leading us toward: literally a culture in which organ procurement is a routine part of end-of-life care and ‘planned deaths.’ The ethicists predicted that in the not-too-distant future: Machine dependent patients could give consent for organ removal before they are dead. For example, a ventilator-dependent ALS patient could request that life support be removed at 5:00 P.M, but that at 9:00 A.M. the same day he be taken to the operating room, put under general anesthesia, and his kidneys, liver and pancreas removed…The patient’s heart would not be removed and would continue to beat throughout surgery, perfusing the other organs with warm, oxygen-and-nutrient-rich blood until they were removed. The heart would stop, and the patient would be pronounced dead only after the ventilator was removed at 5:00 P.M., according to plan, and long before the patient could die from renal, hepatic, or pancreatic failure.”

And then Mr. Smith concludes this: “There is a direct line from the Terri Schiavo dehydration to the potential for this stunning human strip-mining scenario’s becoming a reality. Indeed, as Arnold and Youngner put it so well, ‘If a look into such a future hurts our eyes (or turns our stomachs), is our discomfort any different from what we would have experienced 30 years ago by looking into the future that is today?'” So this is just an example here. There are people out there saying, “She’s not a person. She doesn’t have personhood. Just because she’s a human doesn’t mean she’s a person. Gotta have other things. If you don’t have those things, then we can make a deal with you or your guardian, harvest your organs, set up a time whereby you will die where your organs are still worth something to us, and then do the surgery to remove the organs. Then we stop your heart, and at that point when you’re dead, you have finally achieved personhood because you will have provided value by donating your worthless, non-personhood organs to others.”