Abortion = Kindness?

[MLM]

From the Blaze.com

 

Kindness

 

This woman who would smother babies is a monster imho.

[Ionic7]

From the Blaze.com

 

Kindness

 

This woman who would smother babies is a monster imho.

 

yay abortions, boo for murder, once it comes out its their problem.

[MLM]

yay abortions, boo for murder, once it comes out its their problem.

 

Here is some light reading for you, I might have found you a friend.

 

From The Lancet, Volume 373, Issue 9661, Pages 423 - 431, 31 January 2009, Emanuel writes:

The complete lives system

 

Because none of the currently used systems satisfy all ethical requirements for just allocation, we propose an alternative: the complete lives system. This system incorporates five principles: youngest-first, prognosis, save the most lives, lottery, and instrumental value. As such, it prioritises younger people who have not yet lived a complete life and will be unlikely to do so without aid. Many thinkers have accepted complete lives as the appropriate focus of distributive justice: “individual human lives, rather than individual experiences, [are] the units over which any distributive principle should operate.” Although there are important differences between these thinkers, they share a core commitment to consider entire lives rather than events or episodes, which is also the defining feature of the complete lives system.

 

Consideration of the importance of complete lives also supports modifying the youngest-first principle by prioritising adolescents and young adults over infants. Adolescents have received substantial education and parental care, investments that will be wasted without a complete life. Infants, by contrast, have not yet received these investments. Similarly, adolescence brings with it a developed personality capable of forming and valuing long-term plans whose fulfilment requires a complete life. As the legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin argues, “It is terrible when an infant dies, but worse, most people think, when a three-year-old child dies and worse still when an adolescent does”; this argument is supported by empirical surveys. Importantly, the prioritisation of adolescents and young adults considers the social and personal investment that people are morally entitled to have received at a particular age, rather than accepting the results of an unjust status quo. Consequently, poor adolescents should be treated the same as wealthy ones, even though they may have received less investment owing to social injustice.

 

The complete lives system also considers prognosis, since its aim is to achieve complete lives. A young person with a poor prognosis has had few life-years but lacks the potential to live a complete life. Considering prognosis forestalls the concern that disproportionately large amounts of resources will be directed to young people with poor prognoses. When the worst-off can benefit only slightly while better-off people could benefit greatly, allocating to the better-off is often justifiable. Some small benefits, such as a few weeks of life, might also be intrinsically insignificant when compared with large benefits.

 

Saving the most lives is also included in this system because enabling more people to live complete lives is better than enabling fewer. In a public health emergency, instrumental value could also be included to enable more people to live complete lives. Lotteries could be used when making choices between roughly equal recipients, and also potentially to ensure that no individual—irrespective of age or prognosis—is seen as beyond saving. Thus, the complete lives system is complete in another way: it incorporates each morally relevant simple principle.

 

When implemented, the complete lives system produces a priority curve on which individuals aged between roughly 15 and 40 years get the most substantial chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated. It therefore superficially resembles the proposal made by DALY advocates; however, the complete lives system justifies preference to younger people because of priority to the worst-off rather than instrumental value. Additionally, the complete lives system assumes that, although life-years are equally valuable to all, justice requires the fair distribution of them. Conversely, DALY allocation treats life-years given to elderly or disabled people as objectively less valuable.

 

Finally, the complete lives system is least vulnerable to corruption. Age can be established quickly and accurately from identity documents. Prognosis allocation encourages physicians to improve patients' health, unlike the perverse incentives to sicken patients or misrepresent health that the sickest-first allocation creates.

 

Objections

We consider several important objections to the complete lives system.

The complete lives system discriminates against older people. Age-based allocation is ageism. Unlike allocation by sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious discrimination; every person lives through different life stages rather than being a single age. Even if 25-year-olds receive priority over 65-year-olds, everyone who is 65 years now was previously 25 years. Treating 65-year-olds differently because of stereotypes or falsehoods would be ageist; treating them differently because they have already had more life-years is not.

 

Age, like income, is a “non-medical criterion” inappropriate for allocation of medical resources. In contrast to income, a complete life is a health outcome. Long-term survival and life expectancy at birth are key health-care outcome variables. Delaying the age at onset of a disease is desirable.

 

The complete lives system is insensitive to international differences in typical lifespan. Although broad consensus favours adolescents over very young infants, and young adults over the very elderly people, implementation can reasonably differ between, even within, nation-states. Some people believe that a complete life is a universal limit founded in natural human capacities, which everyone should accept even without scarcity. By contrast, the complete lives system requires only that citizens see a complete life, however defined, as an important good, and accept that fairness gives those short of a complete life stronger claims to scarce life-saving resources.

 

Principles must be ordered lexically: less important principles should come into play only when more important ones are fulfilled. Rawls himself agreed that lexical priority was inappropriate when distributing specific resources in society, though appropriate for ordering the principles of basic social justice that shape the distribution of basic rights, opportunities, and income.1 As an alternative, balancing priority to the worst-off against maximising benefits has won wide support in discussions of allocative local justice. As Amartya Sen argues, justice “does not specify how much more is to be given to the deprived person, but merely that he should receive more”.

 

Accepting the complete lives system for health care as a whole would be premature. We must first reduce waste and increase spending. The complete lives system explicitly rejects waste and corruption, such as multiple listing for transplantation. Although it may be applicable more generally, the complete lives system has been developed to justly allocate persistently scarce life-saving interventions. Hearts for transplant and influenza vaccines, unlike money, cannot be replaced or diverted to non-health goals; denying a heart to one person makes it available to another. Ultimately, the complete lives system does not create “classes of Untermenschen whose lives and well being are deemed not worth spending money on”, but rather empowers us to decide fairly whom to save when genuine scarcity makes saving everyone impossible.

 

Legitimacy

As well as recognising morally relevant values, an allocation system must be legitimate. Legitimacy requires that people see the allocation system as just and accept actual allocations as fair. Consequently, allocation systems must be publicly understandable, accessible, and subject to public discussion and revision. They must also resist corruption, since easy corruptibility undermines the public trust on which legitimacy depends. Some systems, like the UNOS points systems or QALY systems, may fail this test, because they are difficult to understand, easily corrupted, or closed to public revision. Systems that intentionally conceal their allocative principles to avoid public complaints might also fail the test.

 

Although procedural fairness is necessary for legitimacy, it is unable to ensure the justice of allocation decisions on its own. Although fair procedures are important, substantive, morally relevant values and principles are indispensable for just allocation.

 

Conclusion

Ultimately, none of the eight simple principles recognise all morally relevant values, and some recognise irrelevant values. QALY and DALY multiprinciple systems neglect the importance of fair distribution. UNOS points systems attempt to address distributive justice, but recognise morally irrelevant values and are vulnerable to corruption. By contrast, the complete lives system combines four morally relevant principles: youngest-first, prognosis, lottery, and saving the most lives. In pandemic situations, it also allocates scarce interventions to people instrumental in realising these four principles. Importantly, it is not an algorithm, but a framework that expresses widely affirmed values: priority to the worst-off, maximising benefits, and treating people equally. To achieve a just allocation of scarce medical interventions, society must embrace the challenge of implementing a coherent multiprinciple framework rather than relying on simple principles or retreating to the status quo.

Age-based priority for receiving scarce medical interventions under the complete lives system

 

 

Please also read this Principles for allocation of scarce medical interventions. It is also by Mr. Emanuel with help of a couple others. Got you thinking yet?

[westmich]

PLEASE - someone lock this thread.

[MLM]

PLEASE - someone lock this thread.

Really westmich, why?

[lkline300]

Can't ignore whats coming. Going to be all kinds of crazy stuff happening when the population doubles & there are only jobs for half.

 

Less resources to go around. What will happen to capitalism then ?

 

Learn to take care of each other or "every man for themselves" ?

[MLM]

I was not trying to be provocative when I started this thread. People really say these things. Some of the people saying these things really really mean it. The people that really really mean it don't even know that the things they are saying sound outrageous. Can I ask, would you like to have to stand in front of a board to defend your existence? Where are you at in the "Complete Lives System"? I probably would have already been, how do you say it kindly, KILLED!, MURDERED!

[lkline300]

I've seen this all before.

 

"solient green" I'm past the age, They can eat me, joke will be on them lol.................

 

 

this is already happening here. It's just based on $$$ not age. And the board is the insurance company's.

[westmich]

Really westmich, why?

 

Because this web site has absolutely nothing to do with abortion. This thread will pit pro-life and pro-choice against one another with a lot of nasty words before the thread is finally locked. Let's just jump to the last step now and avoid the mess.

[lkline300]

I don't think it's really about abortion but rather what the value of a life is & will be worth to society .

 

More about when to get rid of the old guy. I should be offended. lol...............

[+RevThad]

Bah, screw the eugenics discussion. I want to adopt 10-20 little workers for my new sweat shop, I will have them working just outside of my grow room, figuring that the extra CO2 production, body heat, and humidity from them working their fingers to nubs will be good for the plants.... recycle an orphan today.

 

 

The preceding message was an attempt at humor, and a poor one at that. Speaking of soilent green, do you think it would make a good compost material?

[MLM]

Because this web site has absolutely nothing to do with abortion. This thread will pit pro-life and pro-choice against one another with a lot of nasty words before the thread is finally locked. Let's just jump to the last step now and avoid the mess.

 

I am surprised to read you think so little of your fellow man/woman. There isn't anyone around here who can have a reasoned discussion about the value of life? Whether you like it or not, the things being discussed, or argued as you would see it ARE happening around us now. These things will impact you also, even if you close your eyes and put your hands over your ears while humming to drown out the sound. One of these things is the Total Lives System. This is going to be the policies implemented when it is discovered that "Health Care" cannot be provided "free" to all U.S. citizens. If you can, imagine the logistics of free providing free Health Care to everyone on this Forum, now multiply that times gazillion (lol). I don't intend to fear monger, just looking for some reasonable discussion. Some of us are pretty much home-bound and this is the extent of human contact besides family ya know. Civil discussion has been acheived on this forum before. Also ya know though that things can get heated over a strain of medicine see Cinderella 99 Is Home, and although it has been said a million times, other things can be discussed then MMJ on this Forum. This is why this topic is posted in the "Let's get personal" section. I hope you will see fit to participate rather than censor.

[Wayne'sWorld]

I don't think it's really about abortion but rather what the value of a life is & will be worth to society .

 

More about when to get rid of the old guy. I should be offended. lol...............

The value of life to society is the cost of arms, ammunition, and knowing one is on the right side of one's god. Nothing more, nothing less.

[MLM]

Bah, screw the eugenics discussion. I want to adopt 10-20 little workers for my new sweat shop, I will have them working just outside of my grow room, figuring that the extra CO2 production, body heat, and humidity from them working their fingers to nubs will be good for the plants.... recycle an orphan today.

 

 

The preceding message was an attempt at humor, and a poor one at that. Speaking of soilent green, do you think it would make a good compost material?

 

[mizerman]

I was not trying to be provocative when I started this thread. People really say these things. Some of the people saying these things really really mean it. The people that really really mean it don't even know that the things they are saying sound outrageous. Can I ask, would you like to have to stand in front of a board to defend your existence? Where are you at in the "Complete Lives System"? I probably would have already been, how do you say it kindly, KILLED!, MURDERED!

WHAT DOES THIS THREAD HAVE TO DO WITH MEDICAL MARIJUANA?

 

WHERE ARE THE MODERATORS?

[MLM]

WHAT DOES THIS THREAD HAVE TO DO WITH MEDICAL MARIJUANA?

 

WHERE ARE THE MODERATORS?

 

Really?

[greenbuddha]

The value of life to society is the cost of arms, ammunition, and knowing one is on the right side of one's god. Nothing more, nothing less.

 

 

And if ANY of us believe ONE POLITICAL PARTY cares more about us and our lives than ANOTHER group of politicians does... that person is living in a TOTALLY delusional world.

 

MONEY runs the politicians NO MATTER WHAT PARTY they belong to and the insurance and other 'companies' control the money.

 

The 'politicians' no matter WHAT party they belong to and the 'big corporation' people will get their share of the available resources... and guess who is going to be left out?

 

Mean while we scurry around trying to find the 'right politician' to tell us what we want to hear to make us 'feel' better... and THEN WE BELIEVE THEM.

 

And the band played on.

[lkline300]

I think to limit ourselves to subjects that contain the words medical marijuana is a little short sighted. Surly a subject like the value of life has some bearing on the mmj issue & many others.

 

Some problems cannot be solved by just focusing on a specific issue. Sometimes a change in general attitudes is needed before progress can take place. For this to happen there must be discussion. Hopefully intelligent discussion. But learning is a process & for humans a long painful process, apparently.....lol.................

 

If we can't laugh at ourselves were never gonna make it.

[lkline300]

And if ANY of us believe ONE POLITICAL PARTY cares more about us and our lives than ANOTHER group of politicians does... that person is living in a TOTAL delusional world.

 

MONEY runs the politicians NO MATTER WHAT PARTY they belong to and the insurance and other 'companies' control the money.

 

The 'politicians' no matter WHAT party they belong to and the 'big corporation' people will get their share of the available resources... and guess who is going to be left out?

 

Mean while we scurry around trying to find the 'right politician' to tell us what we want to hear to make us 'feel' better... and THEN WE BELIEVE THEM.

 

And the band played on.

 

 

Agreed, We have become way to content letting people take care of things for us. And way to "delusional" in beleiving what we're told instead of taking the time to figure things out for ourselves.

[+RevThad]

For some reason that quote from Animal Farm keeps going through my head... "All animals are equal, some animals are more equal than others."

 

The writing is on the wall, it is just taking some folks longer to actually read it. Currently the biggest denier of medical claims in this country (according to the AMA) is Medicare and Medicaid, with the huge influx of folks that are going to be forced into those coverages, it is only logical that the trend will continue to get worse. Bean counters and actuaries will be deciding which treatments have the best return on the dollar, and will be denying payments for other treatments and tests, even critical ones.

 

It's going to be an ugly bumpy ride... the only people that are going to enjoy it are those that enjoy entropy.

 

The whole abortion-eugenics relationship is nothing new either, groups like planned parenthood were designed for that vary reason. They were supposed to be aimed at helping to "homogenize" the country and keep controls on minority populations. There are enough documents out there that discuss the formations of these groups. Most people just don't want to look, or at least accept the truth.

 

Some scary stuff going on in our world...

[Guest thequietone]

No forum I have ever been on is limited to one subject. They all have areas in the forum where members are allowed to talk about anything whether it relates to the forums topic. This is the "Lets Get Personal" Forum and this forum is where members can talk about anything they want. We do not censor this forum that is why there is a warning under the title. I understand that this is one of those topics that get people upset. There are strong feelings on both sides of this topic and I expect this one to get heated at some point. We as mods won't take any action unless this thread turns ugly and everyone starts calling each other names or gives out a threat. Even though this is an uncensored thread we will not allow members to break the forums rules.

[MLM]

Agreed, We have become way to content letting people take care of things for us. And way to "delusional" in beleiving what we're told instead of taking the time to figure things out for ourselves.

 

Thank you Lou.

[lkline300]

For some reason that quote from Animal Farm keeps going through my head... "All animals are equal, some animals are more equal than others."

 

The writing is on the wall, it is just taking some folks longer to actually read it.

 

Some scary stuff going on in our world...

 

 

 

 

Amen to that...............

[MLM]

No forum I have ever been on is limited to one subject. They all have areas in the forum where members are allowed to talk about anything whether it relates to the forums topic. This is the "Lets Get Personal" Forum and this forum is where members can talk about anything they want. We do not censor this forum that is why there is a warning under the title. I understand that this is one of those topics that get people upset. There are strong feelings on both sides of this topic and I expect this one to get heated at some point. We as mods won't take any action unless this thread turns ugly and everyone starts calling each other names or gives out a threat. Even though this is an uncensored thread we will not allow members to break the forums rules.

Thank you for giving us the rope , lol. Looks like we might be able to stay away from the childish behavior. I started this thread because I couldn't believe that woman couldn't see that she said anything wrong. I called her a monster because c'mon, your really gonna smother a baby just because it will have a difficult life, wow! I also wanted to show that as compassionate as she thinks she is, the Government also believes their compassionate to give us "free" Health Care. As an aside, big UPS to everyone who has responded, even the one's who would have had this thread closed.

[Wayne'sWorld]

I have great health care coverage and see no reason that I should subsidize the sick children of those who have not earned the rights I have through long, hard hours of work and investment, just to find myself waiting in line for them to receive free treatment that may save their lives.

 

It's simple if you approach it selfishly!