LIFE DIGEST: Euthanasia booths on street, novelist proposes
- Feb 2, 2010 -
Euthanasia booths should be available on the street so the elderly can have their lives ended, a well-known British novelist says.
“How is society going to support this silver tsunami?” Martin Amis said in an interview published Jan. 24 in The Sunday Times Magazine.
Also in this edition: Mother of four dies after injury during abortion and New stem cell treatment repairs vision.
“There’ll be a population of demented very old people, like an invasion of terrible immigrants, stinking out the restaurants and cafes and shows,” he said. “I can imagine a sort of civil war between the old and the young in 10 or 15 years’ time.
“There should be a booth on every corner where you could get a [lethal] martini and a medal.
“There should be a way out for rational people who’ve decided they’re in the negative. That should be available, and it should be quite easy. I can’t think it would be too hard to establish some sort of test that shows that you understand [what you are doing],” said Amis, 60.
The interview reveals the novelist “rejected his own intrinsic dignity and moral worth in the apparent belief that should he become incapable of producing good writing, his life would be rendered useless,” bioethics commentator Wesley Smith said in a commentary for First Things magazine. “This terror of not being ‘special’ . . . isn’t really about a feared loss of talent (or productivity, or independence, and so on), but an abiding worry that if we lose our vigor or health, we will become unworthy of being loved.”
Smith continued, “This existential terror can only be overcome by embracing human exceptionalism and its corollary that each and every one of us matters – no matter what. . . . If we really want to reverse the tide, we must strive to love our neighbor even more than we love ourselves.”
Mother of four dies after injury during abortion
A mother of four died Jan. 25 after she was injured during an abortion at a Queens, N.Y., clinic.
Alexandra Nunez, 37, of Plainfield, N.J., started bleeding severely during an abortion at A1 Medicine and was taken to a hospital, according to the New York Daily News. One of her arteries was accidentally cut, and Nunez went into cardiac arrest, police sources told the newspaper.
“I’m upset because I never got a chance to say goodbye,” said Nunez’s oldest daughter, Daisy Davila, 19, the Daily News reported.
“We’re not angry. We just want to know what happened,” said Davila, who contended her mother was opposed to abortion.
New stem cell treatment repairs vision
Russell Turnbull’s own stem cells have almost totally restored his lost sight in one eye.
Scientists and doctors at North East England Stem Cell Institute (NESCI) used a new technique to correct what was expected to be permanently blurred vision in his right eye, according to the Telegraph, a British newspaper. Turnbull, 38, lost his sight when ammonia was sprayed into his right eye when he attempted to stop a fight.
Scientists grew a new outside membrane of his cornea from stem cells extracted from his left eye, then stitched it onto the injured cornea, the newspaper reported Dec. 22.
“The stem cell treatment option is aimed at total cure rather than symptom relief only,” said Francisco Figueiredo, a NESCI consultant eye surgeon, according to the Telegraph. “This new treatment will alleviate patient suffering and remove the need for long term multiple medications as well as returning the patient to functional and social independence.”
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Further Learning
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