Soccer Dad

The washington post's medical ethics

A little while ago there were two front page stories in the Washington Post in which the paper allowed its politics to intrude on its reporting. In the first, "Heart Drug for Blacks Endorsed." Normally I would have assumed that a medical advance is a good thing. But because this one was colored by race the Post got in some irrelevancy:

Opponents say marketing the drug this way would be an alarming development that would promote racial stereotyping and the discredited idea that there are fundamental genetic differences among races. They also condemn the plan as an attempt to exploit race for economic reasons.

One problem is that if one listened to the critics, there would other critics (or maybe even the same people!) who would decry how poorly served the black community is by the medical establishment.
But aside from that, this argument is worthless and immoral. Bone marrow transplants are necessarily done within ethnic communities. Genetic compatibility is essential. To argue that people should die rather than donate marrow to people of the same community is immoral. And what possible stereotype is involved here? Finally would people rather have more life or money? Are blacks really being exploited?
These arguments are so perverse to raise them so that you can have a debate is simply irresponsible. This discovery is a good thing and it should not have been presented as if it were ambiguous.
Then there was the tragic story of Susan Torres, a woman who is living only on a respirator in the hope that the fetus she is carrying will survive to viability and avoid the cancer that has rendered her brain dead. In the middle of the article, "Inside Stricken Mother, a Race Between Life and Death" the reporter writes:

If the case brings to mind that of Terri Schiavo, Torres said yesterday, there are really no similarities, because he and Susan's family are in agreement over her treatment and because they have, as best as they can, accepted that if it weren't for the baby, she would be gone.

"I don't want to accept it," Jason Torres said, referring to his wife's death, "but, yeah, I don't think it would be unethical to stop [the ventilator] now. But given the chance to save the life of the child, we've got to give it a try."

Actually it is nothing like the Terry Schiavo case. Susan Torres is brain dead. There would have been no controversy over Terry Schiavo is she had been brain dead. It's true that she wasn't going to recover. But that's not the same thing as brain death. The only reason that Susan Torres is being kept on a respirator is to preserve the life of baby inside her.
But to the Post that believes someone with no chance of recovery is the same as someone who's brain dead, the cases are similar.

Posted by SoccerDad at June 28, 2005 6:27 AM