Bioethics, healthcare policy, and related issues.
Paul Root Wolpe, a highly respected bioethicist, was working awfully hard at the UPenn Bioethics Conference last weekend to picture the Schiavo case as a glass half full. Bioethics.net quotes him:
The real truth - the one hidden in the invective and hostility that infected so much of the debate over the case - is that both sides were right. Terri Schiavo found herself in a medical limbo that left her person and nonperson, severely damaged yet not really suffering, awake and moving yet not perceiving or feeling. That is precisely what makes these cases so tragic. . . .
If we conduct [these debates] without bitterness, assuming our opponents’ good faith, and in a spirit of working toward solutions, perhaps it won’t be quite so hard to die in America.
Good luck with that, Paul.
William Saletan has been on a tear recently, repeatedly offering his now-familiar argument that the pro-choice community has to find some way of appeasing anti-choicers in whatever guise, and whatever venue, he can find. There was a celebrated spat between him and Katha Pollitt in Slate not long ago. When it was over, he didn’t seem to have heard that the things he keeps saying - essentially, that women should settle for whatever they can get and “put Roe behind them” - are infuriating to women who want the rights and freedom they’re entitled to, and not just whatever slips under the right wing’s RADAR.
Yesterday, in a Seattle Times Op-Ed, he went on the same kick, urging pro-choicers to “move beyond Roe” by “making it irrelevant”.
