First, the medical personnel might push for approval of organ donations. If the patient’s organs are not considered usable, you may now encounter another disrespect for human life. Some medical researchers have decided that it is ethical to perform research on “brain dead” patients. A very outrageous article on this new abuse of disabled patients appeared in the January 3, 2006 Chicago Sun-Times. Researchers can use these brain dead patients to try new joint replacement techniques, check the effectiveness of new drugs to stabilize irregular heartbeats, test new alternatives to respirators, etc.

Of course, as soon as this new utilitarian perspective is put into action, further abuses immediately begin to occur. One patient at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Texas was alive but unconscious, and so sick with complications of cancer that his family was about to take him off life support. Translated, that means they were going to allow removal of his respirator so he would die even though he was not declared “brain dead”. M.D. Anderson researcher Dr. Wadih Arap said that in research projects, the soon-to-be-dead can ethically be treated the same way as the recently dead. Arap used this unconscious patient in a study on targeting drugs to specific sites in the body. Arap injected genetically modified viruses that had identification tags and moved through the body like drugs.

Family members allowed this research after receiving assurances the patient would feel no pain. Would you trust such assurances? You should not, given that these assurances may be as inaccurate as the claims made that no pain is felt during starvation and dehydration after feeding tube removal, or that unborn babies feel no pain during abortions.   Pain or no pain, however, allowing medical research on unconscious patients continues to expand the use of morally unacceptable “quality of life” criteria in making decisions to justify euthanasia.

Return to List of Newsletter Articles

IRLC Home Page