Life report — good news and bad
February 26th, 2006 ~ Current eventsYou win some and you lose some. I still can’t believe that the South Dakota House has approved a bill to ban almost all abortions. That may end up being a long way away from the bill being passed, and of course Planned Parenthood plans to sue, which means that it would go before the Supreme Court … and that surely means a lot of loud talk all over the place before it’s over. But, it’s still something that I thought was years away, so that’s, y’know, unbelievable.
But then, I also can’t believe this story — that in England, a judge has ruled that doctors should determine whether to withhold life support from a two-year-old, over the protestations of the girl’s parents. So parents are no longer considered the last word on the “right” to die, which means that the state is letting her die. Tell me again why England is against capital punishment?
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February 27th, 2006 at 11:42 pm
Isn’t this just a natural outgrowth of single-payer (i.e., socialized) healthcare? If the state is the ultimate decision point on how much gets spent on healthcare, then they also eventually become the rationers of healthcare. It’s sad, but completely consistent with a socialized-medicine approach.
February 28th, 2006 at 12:09 am
Sorry to say, you’re probably right about this. It’s something that I’ve thought about, though it’s not a very pleasant thought.
The fact is, healthcare is damned expensive and hospitals are overloaded. As more and more baby boomers get older, there may eventually come a time when everyone just averts their eyes from the fact that some authorities (doctors, hospitals, insurance companies, government regulations) make the decisions about who lives and when it’s all just gotten too expensive to sustain.
The scary thing to me about the Schiavo case and this one is how cold-bloodedly people seem to be going into that twilight. I haven’t heard a peep about this alarming story on talk radio or the conservative blogs.