Euthanasia

35 year-old Italian woman Eluana Englaro has been in a coma for 17 years, following a car accident in 1992. After years of debate in the legislature and in public, her father has finally been granted the right by the court to have her feeding tube unplugged. The Roman Catholic church has spoken out against this of course, with Cardinal Antonelli saying,

"Eluana is in a 'vegetative state,' but she is not a vegetable. She is a person who is sleeping," he said. "The person, also when she is sleeping or disabled, retains all of her dignity. The person is valuable in herself, not for what she produces or consumes, or for the pleasure or satisfaction she gives to others." - catholicnewsagency.com

The Free Dictionary defines Euthanasia as being "The act or practice of ending the life of an individual suffering from a terminal illness or an incurable condition, as by lethal injection or the suspension of extraordinary medical treatment."  However, this one definition encompasses what I think are two very different actions.  The first is to actively kill someone who is suffering terrible pain.  The second is to withdraw an unnatural means of keeping the suffering person alive.  One is active, the other is passive, and it can't be right to talk about them as being the same thing.

Ideally, Eluana would continue to receive her life support through the feeding tubes. However, we do not live in an ideal world, and there is suffering everywhere.  At some level, we are forced to place a dollar-value on a person's life; we must make the awful decision between investing money here, to save one life, or here, to save ten lives.

One other notable aspect of such a case, is that it sets a precedent for future cases.  Will an amendment to Italy's euthanasia law provide a loophole for people wishing to end their own life, or the life of a relative?

Bioethics Questions put to McCain, Obama

Nancy Gibbs at TIME puts a couple of good bioethic questions to McCain and Obama.  "Imagine if the presidential candidates were willing to talk frankly about the things that affect us most: not just guns and butter, but also life and death..." she says.

For Barack Obama: Democrats have long argued for greater reproductive freedom. Do you think that should include the right to choose the sex of your child? The same genetic tests that screen for terrible diseases could in theory target many other predispositions. What if prospective parents could screen for short or shy or gay or blond? This is a largely unregulated universe of treatment; should it be?

For John McCain: About 8,000 people may die this year waiting for organ transplants. Do you think the free market should include kidneys? You've said human rights begin at conception. But fertility clinics create excess embryos that are frozen and often discarded, which you've favored using for research. So are some embryos more equal than others?

Click here to read her entire article.  Click here to read Albert Mohler's comments.

Dolls

nice dolls.

I do not give too much of my time to thinking about dolls. However the subject came up in a conversation - specifically, Barbie dolls. Mum taught me from a young age that Barbie dolls were not good. Not that I wanted to play with them as a young boy, but we saw them in other people's homes, and on shelves down at the mall. My sister never had a Barbie doll - save one given her by her aunty - and hastily dispatched of soon after Aunty's visit.

The Barbie Dolls range was one of the first to introduce to little girls, the concept of playing with, and dressing up grown-up women. Without getting too specific, it is obvious at a first glance that certain features, or dare I say it, dimensions of these Barbie dolls are provocative and unrealistic. I find it hard to believe that parents allow their children to play with these coquettish dolls. Isn't society bad enough as it is without handing our young girls little "supermodel-dolls" to play with?

Then you've got Ken of course, and a whole wardrobe of clothes for your little girls to dress the well-toned body of a grown-up male doll. It's really not a very pretty picture. Just as bad, in my mind, is the all too frequent occasions that one sees an abandoned Barbie doll, lying on the lounge-room floor - all it's clothes gone, and toussled, matted hair.

A blog post written by Doug Philips of Vision Forum in September 2007 comes to mind. I will include a couple of excerpts from his well-written article, below...

"One of the most iconic symbols of childhood play is the doll. Dolls have always served an important role in culture, primarily in preparing daughters to be mothers. At the heart of doll play are two important concepts: identification and imagination. For example, the baby doll in the hands of a girl is a tool that helps her to identify with motherhood. The dress-up doll at her bedroom tea party allows her to imagine her own future role building a culture of hospitality for her family. With the historical doll a young lady both imagines and identifies with the adventures of girlhood past. The point is this: dolls have traditionally played an important role in the social and intellectual development of young ladies.

Dolls as a Tool of Cultural Revolution

Humanists, including feminists of various stripes, recognize the power of play in shaping cultural identity and gender norms. Because doll play has historically been so closely associated with a distinctively Christian understanding of the roles of men and women, the feminist tactic usually takes one of two forms: The first approach is based on the notion that sex-specific play, education, and role modeling are inherently oppressive. This approach seeks to discourage role distinctions by encouraging both parents and manufacturers to accept more of an androgynous and gender-bending approach to the toys. Under this model, parents should not assume that dolls are for girls, or that toy soldiers are for boys—and neither should manufacturers or their advertising agencies.

If I am fortunate to have any children, there's no way they'll be allowed Barbie dolls, or anything even remotely like them.

"cheap and nasty"