Month: October 2012

The Morning Coffee Bioethics Blues

It’s early and this promises to be a long day. I have to fly to New York tonight where I’ll be speaking in the morning to high school guidance counselors about the honors program I direct at Syracuse University. It’s early though. I can still pack, walk my dogs, finish some business. The mind enjoys its small compensations. 

 

The mind likes coffee. The mind does not like contemporary bioethicists who subborn people with disabilities into categories of further abjection. Peter Singer and his posse. 

If you parse the thinking of the Singerites down to its minimalist acorn their thinking is that medicine is aimed at curing people, not assuring people the most dignified and diverse lives possible. Why am i thinking about this? It’s early and this promises to be a long day. I will likely be treated poorly by New York City taxi drivers, maybe airline personnel. My disability marks me as a sub-caste and there’s no getting around it. And American academics hold the same prejudices. The mind likes coffee. 

 

Last night I was explaining to my stepson how metaphorical thinking contributes to human manners of inequality. I told him that we think imagination is a terrific moral force, but in fact it’s equally primitive and awful–a thought he hadn’t quite allowed himself. My point was that symbolic thinking will kill us if we don’t master it. Just call me Ernst Cassirer. 

 

The utilitarian idea that good lives are those that are flawless, or can be made so is tied to the industrial revolution–good lives are lives that can be devoted to the factories. 

 

The mind likes coffee. 

 

Clearly I haven’t had enough this morning. 

 

Of Peter Singer:

 

 

“In an interview with The Independent newspaper in England, Singer said he would definitely kill a disabled newborn baby.

He indicated he would do so “if that was in the best interests of the baby and of the family as a whole.”

http://www.lifenews.com/2006/09/12/bio-1766/

 

 

 

Advocacy Groups Push For 'Strong, Unequivocal' Legal Guidance On Organ Transplants

(Babble.com)
October 1, 2012

WASHINGTON, DC– [Excerpt provided by Inclusion Daily Express] In response to two major stories involving people with disabilities being denied organ transplants, in part due to their disabilities, a national coalition of fourteen different advocacy groups is pushing for change.

The National Disability Leadership Alliance met with senior staff at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Division of Transplantation, to urge HHS to issue legal guidance to transplant facilities regarding their responsibilities under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The National Disability Leadership Alliance (NDLA) is comprised of fourteen advocacy organizations that are run by and for people with disabilities At the meeting, NDLA was represented by Ari Ne’eman, president of Autistic Self-Advocacy Network; Kelly Buckland, Executive Director of the National Council on Independent Living; and Diane Coleman, president of Not Dead Yet. The group discussed organ procurement and transplantation policies, and how they impact people with disabilities of all kinds.

Among the issues discussed were ensuring meaningful consent in organ procurement efforts and addressing discrimination against people with disabilities in accessing organ transplants. NDLA’s representatives raised the recent cases of Amelia Rivera and Paul Corby, individuals with developmental disabilities denied access to transplant waiting lists, and urged HHS to issue “strong and unequivocal legal guidance to prevent such acts of discrimination,” according to ASAN’s website.

Entire article:
Disability Advocacy Groups Push for ‘Strong, Unequivocal’ Legal Guidance on Organ Transplants
http://tinyurl.com/ide1001123

Dryad

Comes in summer, sneaking back, my brother. He was my twin.  In life he had no talent. Comes in summer as a dragon fly. 

 

Weightless like all the soldiers of the dead my brother walks–upturned eyes of life in his footprints. 

 

Did you ever hear a thrush create a lonely pillar of song? This is something like that.