Bioethics:  
introduction to theories from hell

by Alice Mailhot
 
copyright 1994, Mouth magazine 

If I were listing the most dangerous people in the U.S. today, bioethicists, 
aka medical ethicists, would top my list - 'way above skinheads, whose beliefs 
they appear to share. 

Bioethicists live off tax dollars and wealthy foundations. They teach medical 
professionals and community elites to decide who lives and who dies. 

Bioethicists are selling death to communities right now as health care rationing. 
Their message: to plan a health care system, first decide who pays for it. They 
call this a "grassroots" movement. 

Bioethicists see cost savings in cheap and early death. "Preventive medicine 
drives up the ultimate cost of health care to society by enlarging the population of 
the elderly and infirm. The child who would have died from polio will grow up to 
be a very expensive old man or woman.... Good medicine keeps sick people 
alive, thereby increasing the number of sick people in the population." - Willard 
Gaylin, M.D. and renowned bioethicist, Harpers Magazine, October 1993. 

Note how money outweighs life. Note how Gaylin divides people: "elderly and 
infirm" vs everyone else. 

And on that note: "If we assume that the disabled do not have a right to unlimited 
health care because no one has such a right, then are the disabled morally 
obligated to establish their own health priorities for themselves within the context 
of a limited budget?... I believe that this question requires an affirmative answer, 
painful as it might be for the disabled themselves." - Leonard Fleck, Ph.D., "Just 
Caring: Health Care and the Disabled," Medical Humanities Report, Spring 
1992. 

If we agree to fight each other for a bite of "our" slice of the pie, exactly who is 
slicing the pie? Bioethicists? 

Gatekeeping is another way to ration health care. Bioethicists teach medical 
professionals to put community health (and wealth) first, to count the cost of 
taking care of us against our apparent value to society. 

"The danger [of a doctor being partial to his/her patients] is the fragmentation of 
the moral community and the claims of impartiality. Concerns regarding justice 
seem especially jeopardized by this fragmentation... How partial may a physician 
be to his/her patients?" - Leonard Fleck, Ph.D., "Justice, Partiality, and the 
Doctor-Patient Relationship," Medical Humanities Report, Fall 1990 

I go to a doctor for health care. Who goes to be judged? Who goes for "justice?" 

What has happened to the doctor's duty to patients? 

Bioethics happened.