…reminds one of Jonathan Swift’s essay “A Modest Proposal” in which he sets forth a set of propositions which, when taken one right after another, justify Englishmen eating Irish children. Swift was being satirical. Pope is deadly serious. Pope’s piece is supposed to be a summary of the scope of current assisted suicide laws and the trends in expansion. His review omits one key thing though and that is the resistance!…
…ld say, ‘I find this condition intolerable.’ Other people won’t.” Kudos to Thaddeus Pope for his honesty! Now if other proponents can be equally as honest, we can have out in the open the outrage of declaring some people are “better dead than disabled.” Second Thoughts MA and the national disability rights group Not Dead Yet argue that disabled people deserve equal protection under the law regarding suicide prevention services. The transcript of t…
…ent suggesting that this wasn’t a “miracle” but a “rush to judgment” case. Pope never replied to Wesley. Pope had already weighed in with his major concern over the story: There really are limits to prognostication. That fact and cases like this will continue to prevent some surrogates from accepting recommendations to move to comfort care only. There is often a remote chance of error, a chance that there will be a “miracle.” Not for the first tim…
…e about something I hadn’t heard before. It turns out that this particular Pope’s feelings regarding euthanasia may be as rooted in personal experience as they are in his religious beliefs, according to a recent children’s book about the life of Pope Benedict XVI. (his name was Joseph Ratzinger before election to his current office) This story in The Scotsman provides an important glimpse at an early chapter of his life in Germany: At around the s…
…ying desired health care could do so. Another critic is Professor Thaddeus Pope, who wrote about the Oklahoma law in a piece entitled “Defending Disability Discrimination.”[iii] Pope argued that “[t]his blanket prohibition rests on a limited and inaccurate assumption that considerations of an individual’s disability could never have the possibility of being relevant to the appropriateness of medical treatment. Settled principles of law and ethics…
