Rage Against the ‘Bioethicists’ and the Dying of the Light

Why are we so eager to have ‘socially responsible’ conversations about how to let coronavirus patients die?

By Lee Siegel

April 3, 2020 2:10 pm ET

PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES/ISTOCKPHOTO

I keep thinking of Dylan Thomas: “Do not go gentle into that good night. / Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” What has drawn this verse up from childhood memory is the debate, once limited to the rarefied precincts of bioethical conferences and worst-case-scenario policy papers, about the rationing and imposed do-not-resuscitate orders at hospitals overwhelmed by coronavirus patients.

As a rational member of society, I understand why such a morally fraught issue has become a subject of everyday discussion. Doctors and nurses are seeing their emergency rooms and hospitals overcome by patients with pneumonia. The device that can keep alive the most critically ill of these patients is the ventilator, which enables them to breathe when they cannot. Many of these hospitals face a shortage of ventilators. This means that doctors will have to make agonizing decisions about who gets one.

Not only that, but given the shortage of personal protective equipment, doctors and nurses risk infection when they intubate a patient or resuscitate someone having a heart attack. Even doctors and nurses who are protected understandably fear getting infected and infecting their families. Some avoid such a danger by issuing an order not to resuscitate patients they deem beyond saving.

To repeat, as a rational member of society, I understand the cold calculation of letting one person die to save many and of preserving the indispensable lives of doctors and nurses.

As a particular human being, however, I do not have a socially responsible, rational response. I am a 62-year-old man with two young children and an asthmatic allergy that makes me vulnerable to lower respiratory diseases. I almost died of pneumonia when I was a child, and I get bronchitis almost every year.

I am revolted by any doctor who says that he would, in a split second, make the decision to refuse to put me or someone I love on a ventilator or, despite being fully protected, refuse to resuscitate us.

When I hear talk of shortages and risk, I respond, emotionally and selfishly: “Get some then!” And, “But you’re a doctor!”

Much of President Trump’s appeal is that he says—or tweets—thoughts that more politic figures suppress. I am no fan of this president, but I find the calm, decorous debate in the media over who should be saved in a hospital—and who should not—disingenuous in the extreme.

Part of the reason is that none of these people, despite their politically correct attitudes, stop to consider the influence that race, class or sexual identity might have on such dire decision-making. Just when wokeness might for once provide an important insight, liberals given to abstractly musing about medical rationing pretend that we live in a just and equal society.

Such “socially responsible” talk has two effects. One is to confer a kind of vicarious altruism on the people who indulge in it. The other is to normalize a horrifying practice, one that should not even be considered except in extremis.

What is curious about the reporting on such debates is that it seldom presents a debate. You usually get a doctor, or more often a “bioethicist”—an academic who is neither a physician nor a scientist—comfortably explaining the ins and outs of allowing a hospital patient—an inestimably precious human being—to die.

What you don’t get is the perspective of a doctor who would rather risk his life than allow a patient to die. You don’t hear from the vast majority of doctors and nurses who don’t consider themselves “heroes” for going to work during the pandemic, because healing people is a sacred obligation that they have vowed to fulfill every day of their own inestimably precious lives.

The complacent tossing about of apocalyptic scenarios in which doctors—or hospital administrators—allow patients to die is a product of the liberal media’s view that shortages of ventilators and protective equipment are a catastrophic dysfunction of uncaring or corrupt politics. In reality, it is the result of a tragic situation that leaders failed to foresee, and that society inevitably will encounter obstacles in addressing.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4498396&forum_id=2#39938838)

fuck this guy

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4498396&forum_id=2#39938883)