Bella Santorum taken to hospital
katievs ·
Jan 29 at 8:16am
Say a prayer for the Santorum family. Their three year-old-daughter, Bella, was taken to the hospital in Philadelphia today. Rick Santorum has canceled his campaign events to be with her.
Please look at this man's face. Look at its warmth and humanity. Then thank God that such men are still willing to run for high office in this country.
Look at that little girl's face. Look at her joy in life and her confidence in her father's love. Then thank God that there are still such parents in the world, who know that each and every life, no matter how imperfect, is a gift to be cherished.
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Dec '11
Re: Bella Santorum taken to hospital
Consequently, we create lists for potential recipients.
Again, we don't base them upon IQ. Nor should we.
Apparently, you haven't read the entire thread. Priority isn't based simply upon IQ. The medical fact is that Down Syndrome children suffer from a plethora of other problems which would, absent their retardation, make them poor candidates for a heart transplant.
Don't demonize the doctors who have to make these judgments. Someone has to. The only other solution is a lottery system, which would mean that many children who do have a positive long-term prognosis would die in order to provide transplants to Downs children whose long-term prognosis is dire, because Down Syndrome children are much more predisposed to heart problems than children who do not suffer from Downs.
Feb '11
Re: Bella Santorum taken to hospital
Nobody's Perfect: A British hospital has refused to approve a heart transplant for a 9-year-old girl afflicted with Down's syndrome because her quality of life is not good enough, according The Times of London on Sunday.
Quality of life issues among Down Syndrome children goes much, much further than mental retardation. Down children suffer high rates of heart disease, leukemia, thyroid and gastrointestinal disorders, epilepsy, Alzheimer's, vision and hearing disorders, crippling neuro-degenerative disorders and early death.
There are only so many transplant hearts to go around. To transplant a heart into a Downs sufferer is to deny a chance of life to an otherwise-healthy child.
Because of course, all children waiting on the heart transplant list;for goodness sake are "otherwise healthy." To get on the list requires a doctor's approval and means that you must be near death without a transplant. Your moral condescension and utilitarian ethics, fortunately, have no role to play -- yet.
Quality of life issues among Down syndrome children go much much further than mental retardation. Instead, they exhibit much more joy and contentment than most other people generally. Life is so beautiful - try being more loving.
Edited on Jan 30 at 3:06amSep '11
Re: Bella Santorum taken to hospital
Michael Labeit
Hearts are a scarce resource, particularly since the distribution of hearts for money is illegal. Suppose your daughter required a heart transplant. On what grounds should she be a heart transplant recipient at the expense of any other girl of the same age, cognitively intact or not?
Accepting your hypothetical, there should be three factors in the decision: who is the most compatible match (thus, the most likely candidate for a successful surgery)? Who is the candidate that is still a viable candidate for surgery, but closest to death? And which candidate can be in surgery soonest?
But absolutely NOT who is the most "deserving."
Once you start getting into "quality of life" decisions with platoons of ethicists with graduate degrees in "asking hard questions" you end up with pure subjectivity--what many here have termed playing God. And funny thing--when we get people asking "hard" questions, and "wrestling with difficult choices about scarce resources" the beneficiaries tend to be white, tall, blond(e), and well-to-do.
May '10
Re: Bella Santorum taken to hospital
Michael Labeit
Is a heart scarce? Yes. Do people want them? Yes. Then its a good. According to the study of economics, they are reducible to such. If you prohibit yourself from conceptualizing hearts as goods, then you render yourself completely incapable of understanding the "production" and distribution of them. ·
Life is not reducible to economics.
Is virtue scarce? Yes. Do people want it? Yes. Can it be bought? No.
How about love? It is deeply desired and hard to find. Can it be bought and sold? No.
Then there are things that could be bought and sold, but which, out of reverence or humanity, we restrain ourselves from buying and selling. Like our bodies.
They are goods; they are not commodities. They are not "produced"; they are offered; they are given and received as precious gifts, not bought and sold as things.
Edited on Jan 30 at 5:23amMay '10
Re: Bella Santorum taken to hospital
Michael Labeit
Prove that it is an intellectual or moral error to taxonomize hearts as goods. You issue statements with unadulterated certitude but provide no evidence. I demonstrated why hearts are goods by showing how they meet the necessary conditions for such a designation. By contrast, you make categorical claims without even suggesting to offer some support. ·
Michael, not everything true can or need be proved. Aristotle pointed out: if everything had to be proved, nothing could be. We reason from what we recognize to be true.
Nor is all reasoning taxonomizing and conceptualizing and inferencing and deducting and concluding. Some is intuitive, and searching.
But you have somehow blotted out of consideration whatever doesn't fit into your desiccated, logistical categories, and then demand evidence for things that are right before your eyes, if only you had eyes to see them. It's as if you insist that we all join you in contemplating the world in black and white and two dimensions.
There are whole spheres of reality that a person who is not open will not see.
Remember Plato's analogy of the cave? Remember Pascal? "The heart has reasons that reason does not know."
Edited on Jan 30 at 6:27amNov '11
Re: Bella Santorum taken to hospital
Thank you, Katie! Continuing to pray; word that Bella is improving [1/30]...
May '10
Re: Bella Santorum taken to hospital
Katievs, when you ask if virtue is scarce you equivocate on the word scarce. In economics, to say that a good is scarce is to claim that it is limited with respect to the number of objectives to which it may be devoted. By constrast, to say that virtue is scarce is merely to say that few people exhibit it. The same applies to love as you conceive of it. And I find the bought and sold emphasis to be irrelevant. Economists study "autistic" or non-exchange economocs as well. Furthermore, goods and commodities are synonyms; you do not introduce anything new by making such a distinction. Hearts remain as goods/commodities. They are a scarce means to an end. I'm not going to withdraw a truth because it makes someone sqeamish or impinges upon their moral framework.
May '10
Re: Bella Santorum taken to hospital
Intuition is the poor man's version of reason. When philosophers can't quite ground a belief in evidence, they appeal to intuition and leave it at that. Sorry, not my cup of tea.
May '10
Re: Bella Santorum taken to hospital
So, where's your evidence that goods and commodities are synonymous?, or that it's morally licit to treat all goods as commodities?