posted on November 29, 2001 03:17:42 PM new
Terminally Ill British Woman Loses Legal Appeal for Assisted Suicide
By Jill Lawless, Associated Press Writer
Published: Nov 29, 2001
LONDON (AP) - A terminally ill woman paralyzed by a degenerative disease lost her case Thursday before Britain's highest appeals court, where she was fighting for the right to die with her husband's help.
Diane Pretty then said she would challenge the decision in the European Court of Human Rights.
Five judges at the House of Lords ruled that Pretty's human rights were not violated by an earlier ruling against her bid to "die with dignity."
Pretty, 43, is paralyzed from the neck down by motor neuron disease and confined to a wheelchair. She challenged the Director of Public Prosecutions' refusal to grant her husband, Brian, immunity if he helped her die.
In October, a lower court agreed that Brian Pretty could not be guaranteed immunity from prosecution. Suicide is legal in Britain, but helping someone else commit suicide is a crime punishable by up to 14 years in prison.
The five judges in the House of Lords said they were moved by Diane Pretty's plight, but ruled that Britain's Human Rights Act did not protect Brian Pretty from being charged.
"No one of ordinary sensitivity could be unmoved by the frightening ordeal which faces Mrs. Diane Pretty," said Lord Bingham of Cornhill.
However, he said, the judges could not assess the morality of the right to die, but only apply the law of the land.
Diane Pretty said she was "angry and disappointed" by the ruling and would appeal to the European Court in Strasbourg, France.
"I feel I have no rights," said Pretty, who communicates through a typing machine. "The (judges) don't want to admit that the law is wrong."
Pretty's lawyer, Philip Havers, noted that his client would legally be allowed to end her life, but could not because she is incapable. The right to life enshrined in human rights law includes the right to self-determination over life and death, he said.
After the judges rejected this view, right-to-die advocates called for a new law allowing assisted suicide.
"The overwhelming public support for Diane's case shows very clearly that it is time Parliament reassessed this law," said another Diane Pretty lawyer, Mona Arshi from the civil-rights group Liberty.
Anti-euthanasia campaigners, who argue that right-to-die legislation would endanger disabled and vulnerable people, were relieved by Thursday's ruling.
"I was really terrified that if she had won my safety would be compromised," said Alison Davis, who suffers from spina bifida, osteoporosis and emphysema. "Fortunately, I am surrounded by people who helped me see you can still be dignified even if you are disabled."
The British Council of Disabled People congratulated the Law Lords.
"To make provisions for ending a life that are different for disabled and non-disabled people is a terrifying prospect," said council chairman David Colley.
Brian Pretty said his wife's condition had deteriorated since beginning their legal appeals in August. Havers said Diane Pretty only had months to live.
Before the ruling, Diane Pretty said she was trying to retain some control over what remained of her life.
"If I am allowed to decide when and how I die, I will feel that I have wrested some autonomy back and kept hold of my dignity," she said.
"That is how I want my family to remember me - as someone who respected the law and asked in turn that the law respected my rights."
posted on November 29, 2001 06:27:44 PM new
Regardless of ethical or moral views, those that develope cloning will be the one's that can exert the most control over it.
Ethical and moral standards have never stopped science, it can create obsticles, which will be by-passed, only now much quicker.
If the U.S. doesn't pursue this technology, the scientists will leave the U.S. and develope it elsewhere. Wherever the technology is developed will determine the direction the technology takes.
Imagine if the best gene splicers and cloners were in Afghanistan or Iraq. Do you think they would be developing oranisms to prevent or cure diseases ? More than likely they would be developing deadly bacteria or other leathal agents.
In order to exert control and benefit from the technology, we must first possess and develope it before anyone else.
I would much rather go to the Cleveland Clinic to receive my cloned heart transplant than have to go to Rome or South Africa for it.
Ignoring this technology or outlawing it will not make it disappear, but it will determine when, where, how, and by whom it will be used.
I would also mention that cloning organs for transplant will not be done by growing humans for spare parts. It will more than likely be done as cloned skin is now grown, or through cellular transplant into the patient's own body, or grown in an animal's body.
However, not pursuing this technology would be like opting out of the industrial revolution on moral grounds. There were many moral arguments posed against ralroads, factories, and the automobile when first introduced.
This technology will be developed, I only hope we are wise enough to have it developed here.
There is an interesting article here about cloning versus genetic engineering.
Ethical considerations are a big issue and if public opinion stops the development of the process here it will be developed by private industry and the cost will be prohibitive for most people.
Excerpt...
Reasons for Cloning
This final area of contention in the cloning debate is as much psychological as it is scientific or philosophical. If human cloning technology were safe and widely available, what use would people make of it? What reasons would they have to engage in cloning?
In its report to the President, the Commission imagined a few situations in which people might avail themselves of cloning. In one scenario, a husband and wife who wish to have children are both carriers of a lethal recessive gene:
Rather than risk the one in four chance of conceiving a child who will suffer a short and painful existence, the couple considers the alternatives: to forgo rearing children; to adopt; to use prenatal diagnosis and selective abortion; to use donor gametes free of the recessive trait; or to use the cells of one of the adults and attempt to clone a child. To avoid donor gametes and selective abortion, while maintaining a genetic tie to their child, they opt for cloning.
In another scenario, the parents of a terminally ill child are told that only a bone marrow transplant can save the child's life. "With no other donor available, the parents attempt to clone a human being from the cells of the dying child. If successful, the new child will be a perfect match for bone marrow transplant, and can be used as a donor without significant risk or discomfort. The net result: two healthy children, loved by their parents, who happen [sic] to be identical twins of different ages."
The Commission was particularly impressed by the second example. That scenario, said the NBAC report, "makes what is probably the strongest possible case for cloning a human being, as it demonstrates how this technology could be used for lifesaving purposes." Indeed, the report suggests that it would be a "tragedy" to allow "the sick child to die because of a moral or political objection to such cloning." Nevertheless, we should note that many people would be morally uneasy about the use of a minor as a donor, regardless of whether the child were a result of cloning. Even if this unease is justifiably overridden by other concerns, the "transplant scenario" may not present a more compelling case for cloning than that of the infertile couple desperately seeking a biological child.
Most critics, in fact, decline to engage the specifics of such tragic (and presumably rare) situations. Instead, they bolster their case by imagining very different scenarios. Potential users of the technology, they suggest, are narcissists or control freaks -- people who will regard their children not as free, original selves but as products intended to meet more or less rigid specifications. Even if such people are not genetic determinists, their recourse to cloning will indicate a desire to exert all possible influence over the "kind" of child they produce.
The critics' alarm at this prospect has in part to do, as we have seen, with concerns about the psychological burdens such a desire would impose on the clone. But it also reflects a broader concern about the values expressed, and promoted, by a society's reproductive policies. Critics argue that a society that enables people to clone themselves thereby endorses the most narcissistic reason for having children -- to perpetuate oneself through a genetic encore. The demonstrable falsity of genetic determinism may detract little, if at all, from the strength of this motive. Whether or not clones will have a grievance against their parents for producing them with this motivation, the societal indulgence of that motivation is improper and harmful.
It can be argued, however, that the critics have simply misunderstood the social meaning of a policy that would permit people to clone themselves even in the absence of the heartrending exigencies described in the NBAC report. This country has developed a strong commitment to reproductive autonomy. (This commitment emerged in response to the dismal history of eugenics -- the very history that is sometimes invoked to support restrictions on cloning.) With the exception of practices that risk coercion and exploitation -- notably baby-selling and commercial surrogacy -- we do not interfere with people's freedom to create and acquire children by almost any means, for almost any reason. This policy does not reflect a dogmatic libertarianism. Rather, it recognizes the extraordinary personal importance and private character of reproductive decisions, even those with significant social repercussions.
Our willingness to sustain such a policy also reflects a recognition of the moral complexities of parenting. For example, we know that the motives people have for bringing a child into the world do not necessarily determine the manner in which they raise him. Even when parents start out as narcissists, the experience of childrearing will sometimes transform their initial impulses, making them caring, respectful, and even self-sacrificing. Seeing their child grow and develop, they learn that she is not merely an extension of themselves. Of course, some parents never make this discovery; others, having done so, never forgive their children for it. The pace and extent of moral development among parents (no less than among children) is infinitely variable. Still, we are justified in saying that those who engage in cloning will not, by virtue of this fact, be immune to the transformative effects of parenthood -- even if it is the case (and it won't always be) that they begin with more problematic motives than those of parents who engage in the "genetic lottery."
Moreover, the nature of parental motivation is itself more complex than the critics often allow. Though we can agree that narcissism is a vice not to be encouraged, we lack a clear notion of where pride in one's children ends and narcissism begins. When, for example, is it unseemly to bask in the reflected glory of a child's achievements? Imagine a champion gymnast who takes delight in her daughter's athletic prowess. Now imagine that the child was actually cloned from one of the gymnast's somatic cells. Would we have to revise our moral assessment of her pleasure in her daughter's success? Or suppose a man wanted to be cloned and to give his child opportunities he himself had never enjoyed. And suppose that, rightly or wrongly, the man took the child's success as a measure of his own untapped potential -- an indication of the flourishing life he might have had. Is this sentiment blamable? And is it all that different from what many natural parents feel?
Conclusion
Until recently, there were few ethical, social, or legal discussions about human cloning via nuclear transplantation, since the scientific consensus was that such a procedure was not biologically possible. With the appearance of Dolly, the situation has changed. But although it now seems more likely that human cloning will become feasible, we may doubt that the practice will come into widespread use.
I suspect it will not, but my reasons will not offer much comfort to the critics of cloning. While the technology for nuclear transplantation advances, other technologies -- notably the technology of genetic engineering -- will be progressing as well. Human genetic engineering will be applicable to a wide variety of traits; it will be more powerful than cloning, and hence more attractive to more people. It will also, as I have suggested, raise more troubling questions than the prospect of cloning has thus far.
posted on December 4, 2001 06:47:20 PM new
Genetic engineering has been going on for centuries. We've been doing it to animals and plants since domestication.
It has been done with humans, albeit, unknowingly for centuries.
The only difference is that the facade of deliberate "natural" engineering versus deliberate laboratory engineering will be pierced.
What are the differences between me having a brown skinned, brown eyed offspring by virtue of chosing a mate to produce those traits and using lab engineered genes to produce those traits ? - other than the oblivious pleasures of sexual reproduction. LOL.
The religious objections remind me of Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men when he did his tirade about people not wanting to know the truth. The truth is our make-up and individual capacities are determined by genetics, and neither agent appears to be static. While environment can have an impact, the effect of environment is expressed through available genetic capacity.
Those raising the ethical and moral objections will ultimately lose the argument. Their impact will only determine where the research is done and how it is used.
Sounds like a good movie. I'm going to check it out tomorrow.
This may be the part that you referred to...
Jessep: Son, we live in a world that has walls. And those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who's gonna do it? You? You, Lt. Weinberg? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for Santiago and you curse the Marines. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know: That Santiago's death, while tragic, probably saved lives. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives. You don't want the truth. Because deep down, in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me on that wall. You need me there. We use words like honor, code, loyalty...we use these words as the backbone to a life spent defending something. You use 'em as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom I provide, then questions the manner in which I provide it. I'd prefer you just said thank you and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a weapon and stand a post. Either way, I don't give a damn what you think you're entitled to.
Helen
I may have the wrong part here but I'll know it when I see it...
