Isn’t it just about time that we told religious moralists to shove it? Really, when you look at the world today, and consider the offences that religions commit against human dignity and justice, for religions to make claims to speak with authority on moral questions is not only laughable, it is plainly obscene. Religious thought is rightly thought to be “other worldly” — it certainly does not belong in this one. Roman Catholic ethicists, like the incredibly doctrinaire Robert P. George, who thinks that only Catholic morality can be justified by reason, and therefore should be made into law, cannot even imagine how it could be possible for anyone to disagree with them, and yet very few moral philosophers do agree with them. They carry on their moral projects in a private room, as though no one else was thinking about ethics at all. No wonder they are so dismayed when people turn them down.
Take Robert P. George’s arguments regarding the immorality of abortion, for example. He thinks that anyone who thinks that abortion, at any stage, is morally justifiable, is simply wrong, and he thinks that this is a position securely grounded in science itself. I will not go into detail, since I do not think the argument deserves this kind of close attention. Just consider this statement and its sequel:
What the zygote needs to function as a self-integrating human organism, a human being, it already possesses.
At no point in embryogenesis, therefore, does the distinct organism that came into being when it was conceived undergo what is technically called “substantial change” (or a change of natures). It is human and will remain human. [71]
Now, let’s stack this claim up against the claim of the woman in whom this zygote has taken up residence.
In the Independent this morning the main headline is:
Woman dies after being refused an abortion in Irish hospital
Here’s part of the story:
Savita Halappanavar, a dentist aged 31, was 17 weeks pregnant when she died after suffering a miscarriage and septicaemia.
The woman’s husband Praveen Halappanavar, 34, claimed she had complained of being in agonising pain while in Galway University Hospital.
He has said that doctors refused to carry out a medical termination because the foetus’s heartbeat was present.
A “heartbeat was present”! The woman had suffered a miscarriage, for Christ’s sake! But a heartbeat was present, so, conformable to Robert P. George’s (and the Pope’s) dictum, a human being was present. So, instead of rescuing the woman, she was allowed to die, being told that an abortion was contraindicated because “Ireland is a Catholic country.” The idiocy of this is simply stunning, and yet this is what happened. A life of a woman was forfeited, regardless of her own choices, because there was a heartbeat! It’s enough to make one scream, and to call down execrations on the heads of those “in charge,” and it reminds one that “Mother Teresa” (now Blessed Teresa of Calcutta) declared in accepting the Nobel Peace Prize (of all things!), that abortion was “the greatest destroyer of peace in the world.” (We should all retire to Bedlam!) Neither the woman’s distress nor the husband’s request availed anything, and she was left to die because of the inviolable logic of Roman Catholic ethics. It makes me so angry that I want to wring some prelatical throats.
But nothing about Robert P. George’s reasoning stands up to examination. He claims that it is a scientific fact that the zygote is a human being, and by that he means a human person with all the rights and privileges appertaining thereto. But no mere fact of this kind can lead to a moral conclusion. A zygote is human tissue; about that there is no question. But a human being is a moral category, and you can’t simply transit from “zygote” to “human being” without making a mountain of moral assumptions. But for George the claim is enough to determine that the mere existence of a zygote subordinates the choices of the woman upon which it is dependent, “self-integrating” or not, to the choices of others who are thought to have the right to choose for her, even if that means she must die. She has no choice in the matter. This is a form of madness that in any reasonable society would be seen as a pathology, but passes in Princeton and Ireland and the Vatican for rational argument — which may explain why I find reading George’s book so very painful an experience.
Indeed, further, Robert P. George tries to get away with the claim that his moral position is based on science. “Technically,” he says, without acknowledging that the technicality does not belong to science but to theology, the continuity of the zygote with adult human being is “substantial,” or, in other words, there is no “substantial change” between zygote and adult human being. Of course, this is not the language of science; it is the language of Aquinian Aristotelianism, the language of substantial form or essence. For we can point to any number of significant changes that the zygote undergoes on its way to becoming an adult human being, whether they would satisfy Aquinas’ notion of “substantial change” or not, many of which are reasonably be thought to be morally important transitions.
This is only a one example of the idiocy of religious morality, but that doesn’t stop the whole United States Conference of Catholic Bishops from reducing themselves to idiotic penitents because “they” — get this, it was their fault; it doesn’t get much more presumptuous than this – they allowed President Obama to be elected to a second term of office. It was their fault, Cardinal Timothy Dolan admonished them, that Obama was elected. According to Religion News Service:
“The premier answer to the question ‘What’s wrong with the world?’ is not politics, the economy, secularism, sectarianism, globalization or global warming … none of these, as significant as they are,” Dolan said, citing many of the issues that have become favorite targets of the hierarchy.
Instead, Dolan said, quoting English writer and Catholic convert G.K. Chesterton, the answer is contained in two words: “I am.”
And, of course, by extension, Dolan was saying: “You are.” There is not one hint of humility in all of this. The assumption is that only they are right in their assessment of the morality which led them to oppose Obama. They are right, and everyone else is wrong. The American people are on the side of evil for electing Obama. As a religious idiot in Texas said, very much in tune with Cardinal Dolan, Obama is “paving the way” for the rise of the Anti-Christ. These people simply do not have the option of reconsidering their moral imperatives, which, notwithstanding their own confidence, are simply no longer compelling. So they contrive to believe that Christian morality, whether Baptist or Catholic, is no longer compelling because, as Cardinal Dolan so ridiculously puts the problem, they have not lived with sufficient self-loathing.
But, surely, surely, to suggest that people should elect someone like Romney, who, in obedience to the mandate of his church, is 100% opposed to abortion, and so must, in some sense, defend the foolish Republican apologists for rape, and try to explain God’s role in impregnating raped women, rightly seems sheer madness to reasonable people. But these are the exigencies to which one is forced, once you allow yourself no moral wiggle room at all, because your morality is one of absolutisms that would give government officials the right to ride roughshod over anyone’s right to believe and act according to a different moral understanding of the world. It is clear that the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, as well as the fundamentalist evangelicals, have no idea what democracy is about. In the first place, it’s about defending the rights of individuals, not about making the world safe for fundamentalists to intrude into the lives of individuals and overturn those rights. Democracy is about limiting the coercive powers of the state, so that individuals can live their lives unencumbered by state interference in those areas of life where the state’s writ should not run. But religions want to remake society in their own image, and if you consider what this image looks like, in the person of a Timothy Dolan, a Mitt Romney, a Richard Jeffrees, it isn’t much wonder that the American electorate said no. And still they don’t get it. Hence Timothy Dolan’s nostri maxima culpa.
How is it possible for people to paint themselves into a corner like this? The answer seems to be that, in today’s political climate, where moral change is being forced on people who thought that the moral “order” of the 1950s (or Calvinist Geneva, or the Counter-Reformation, or wherever you place your moral society) would last forever, religions have been forced onto the back foot, and in order to keep themselves imprinted on people’s minds in the midst of the media circus, they need to take more and more unyielding positions. That, of course, will imprint itself strongly on people’s minds, but it will often be simply in revulsion against what these apes in strange costumes purport to believe. The odd thing is that Obama, who is by no means a moral adventurer, has been compared, by the Catholic hierarchy, to Hitler and Stalin, when it is really the Catholic hierarchy that is behaving with the kind of ideological mindlessness that characterised fascist dictatorships. For it is they, after all, who are determined to put people into moral straitjackets that will have the kind of consequences exhibited by the apparent moral blindness of the hospital officials in Ireland. If the zygote — which, recall, is the original cell formed by the union of male and female gamete cells — has the same moral standing as an adult human being, then the frightened girl who, for whatever reason, and no matter how young, finds herself pregnant, and in desperation aborts herself or causes a miscarriage, is guilty of first degree murder. No reasonable person thinks this, yet many religious people do, and the pope is committed to it. This strikes me as mindless idiocy.
It is the same mind-set that animates opponents of assisted dying. Nothing, no amount of suffering, no amount of human distress, no matter how long it must be endured, can justify helping a person to die. And yet, in one British social survey, fully 80% of those who believed that assisted dying was morally wrong, but who experienced the miserable death of a loved one, changed their minds. Are we to say that they had no reason to change their minds, or that witnessing the misery of someone they care for was not a good reason to change their minds? Reasoning people will see that humanity is more reasonable than inhumanity. And yet Pope Karol Józef Wojtyła spoke about the “culture of death” of modern society, and Pope Ratzinger rails, without apology, against modern relativism and secularism, when it is they who preside over dying women, and the misery of the suffering, and look away without concern for the consequences of their beliefs. This is what I call the “death cult” of much contemporary religion. It is not only Muslim suicide bombers who are committed to a kind of apotheosis of death. The Catholic god demands death too, as well as the miseries of horrendous suffering on the way to it, no matter how long-delayed, and the bishops flagellate themselves because they failed to convince the American electorate to join them in this veneration of death and misery which they consider, by a strange inversion of reasoning, to be pro-life.
And then, remember, how much of a narrowing of focus is reflected in religious moral concerns. Bishops, Anglican, Catholic or Orthodox, lapse into paroxysms of fury at the thought that the sexual unions of gay and lesbian people might be dignified by the right to marry. Of course, in all this, they refuse to recognise that religion all along has been simply wrong about sexuality. They did not realise — apparently very few did before Kinsey — that homosexuality was not simply a kind of depravity into which otherwise heterosexual people permitted themselves to sink, but that it was a perfectly normal expression along the continuum of sexual response. They did not realise that despite the near certainty that all men have, at one point or another in their lives, masturbated, that 2% consistently lie about it. Nor did they recognise that sexual response is a perfectly natural aspect of being human, not a kind of spiritual degradation of otherwise purely spiritual beings. Poor St. Augustine! He simply couldn’t get his penis to obey his saintly commands. It would disobey him, despite his most strenuous efforts to keep it down! And to top it all off, the pleasure of sexual orgasm is so great that, as he puts it,
there is an almost total extinction of mental alertness; the intellectual sentries, as it were, are overwhelmed. [City of God, Bk. III, Chap. 16]
This has got to be the funniest chapter in all of theology! The poor man was a sexual being, and he spent his life as a Christian trying to deny it, and to ascribe all manner of evil to it. The Catholic Church is committed to Augustine’s programme of sexual repression. If it weren’t so sad it would be hilarious. But it is sad, and there is nothing hilarious about a bunch of sexually repressed men trying to lord it over everyone else. So great is their repression that they still cannot acknowledge that, under the surface, the priesthood is a seething mass of sexually frustrated men unable to keep themselves from “acting out” (and then trying to hide it) in ways that, if they were teenagers, would be explicable, but since they are adults just looks silly where it is not criminal.
The same thing is apparently familiar on the Arab street. Women are clothed in bags because it is believed that their sexual voraciousness would lead men simply to run amok, and yet, in truth, women are subject to the most defiling and degrading acts of sexual assault, being touched and fondled in public places against their will, and sometimes mobbed by gangs of men, as many women in the political protests of the so-called Arab Spring discovered. The degree of sexual repression to which Islam subjects its hordes of young men means that some are bound to “act out” in socially unacceptable ways. But the underlying reasons are religious. Women are, on the one hand, a threat to men’s spiritual wholeness, and yet, on the other hand, bear, between their legs, the focus of men’s honour. It’s a bizarre predicament that women find themselves in, and all, in the end, because of the mindless idiocy of religion, and of men’s inability to deal with sexuality.
Knowing things about ourselves that were not known in ages past, changes everything, but, since the religious are held captive by ancient texts, they can’t, without betrayal, accept that they were wrong, and so they go on being wrong at a time when their mistakes are obvious to everyone with a little bit of knowledge. What makes it so bizarre is that these “holy” men gather together in what are supposed to be adult consultations and scrap over things like women priests and homosexual relationships as though these matters are of supreme importance. In a society of reasonable people they would be a laughing-stock, and people would regard them as more than slightly dotty, and yet whole electorates are sent into convulsions because they cannot move away from such sanctified ignorance.
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Curiously this fine article relates to a book on Existentialism (‘Existentialism for Dummies’ would you believe?) I am currently reading.
The authors say that Existentialists are primarily concerned with humans living in a human world and that this must incorporate human experience (moods and emotions) as well as reason. The authors make the point that Religions (as opposed to belief in gods) become elaborated and embraced the Western world obsession with reason until they become an Absolute System which ‘explains everything’. Naturally since a ‘rational’ religion ‘explains everything’ any contrary belief must be wrong.
The Roman Catholic Church claims to be such an Absolute System – and got away with this assertion while there was no alternative and the Church was deeply embedded in earlier societies. The Bishops are still holding to the party line because if they admit they were wrong, the Church loses its authority as an ‘Absolute System’.
Meanwhile the rest of the world moves on.
It’s peculiar that Catholic theology makes function a kind of God when it comes to procreation and marriage, but denies the proper function of our parts, in the pursuit of a misguided ascetism.
Since it’s the Catholics who have invoked Hitler, it allows me to quote from Laurence Rees’s latest series, The Dark Charisma of Adolf Hitler (shown on Monday night on BBC2 – http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01p01pm/The_Dark_Charisma_of_Adolf_Hitler_Episode_1/): I was struck, not for the first time of course, by the parallels with religion. For example, when communicating his vision to the flock:
It’s clear he liked to follow ‘orders’ too, and appreciated religious methods.
“He has said that doctors refused to carry out a medical termination because the foetus’s heartbeat was present.”
IMO, those doctors are murderers. I’m sure they are fine gentlemen when they listen to their hearts — that is, their human nature. But man-made ideology held a gun to their heads — a gun loaded with blanks — and they shriveled into a bunch of cowards. Why does religion so often make good people so morally stupid?
Isn’t this just self defense? If a person threatens to kill you, can’t you defend yourself and, if need be, kill the attacking person? If foetuses truly are persons, then you should be able to kill one to save your life or the life of another person.
And yet, in one British social survey, fully 80% of those who believed that assisted dying was morally wrong, but who experienced the miserable death of a loved one, changed their minds.
Could you link me to this? I’m sure you blogged about it at the time, but I missed it.
Robert P.George uses Aristotle’s language when it suits him, but ignores Aristotle’s view that abortion is legitimate before the embryo has “life and sensation”, which he puts at 40 days after conception for a male and 90 days for a female:
“…when couples have children in excess, let abortion be procured before sense and life have begun; what may or may not be lawfully done in these cases depends on the question of life and sensation.” (Aristotle, Politics 7.16)
This was brilliant Eric! Unfortunately the abandonment of celibacy in the Protestant Reformation has not advanced us very far morally, though the RC church remains the biggest barrier to moral progress in the western world. I just attended two lectures by the historian Peter Brown on charity and the growth of the clergy in the early church (1st to 4th centuries ad). The success of Christianity, like the success of Hamas or Hezbollah today, was largely due to it’s extraordinary organization of charity. Of course part of the funds raised for charity had to be be used to support those pious souls who devoted their life to holiness and thus could not reasonable be expected to support themselves. Thus the growth of the professional clergy. Until secular society can duplicate the charitable work of religious organizations, religion will remain indispensable. Can nothing but belief in supernatural beings induce us to love our neighbor as ourselves?
You really can’t expect religious believers to think for themselves about awkward decisions, because one of the most important reason — perhaps THE most important reason — why people embrace or stick with religion is precisely in order to have their awkward decisions made for them. This is the everyday payback from religious beliefs: complete freedom from embarrassment or worry about whether you made the right decision; complete absolution from the need to think and consider and consult. “God said it, I do it!” It’s only when people start to see the benefits of thinking for themselves that they will put aside their religious convictions.
Of course, when the benefits of thinking for yourself include not getting laughed at, not being called a murderer, or not going to jail, then that can be a very persuasive argument.
Thing is, even in Ireland, the way she was treated was not in accordance with standards of care. She had the misfortune to be treated by a superannuated religious nut.
Criminally negligent homicide is the charge that should be levied against the doctor. He has zero defense.
Criminally charging him would be the second worse thing you could do. It would please him to no end to be a martyr.
The worst thing would be if someone assassinated him. The church would canonize him or sure.
Paxton, while it is quite correct, as Peter Brown says, that many early successes of the church stemmed from church schemes of charitable support in an age when government could not be looked to do perform such charitable services, it is also true that, besides supporting the clergy, much of the money and property given to the church was used to enrich those clergy and the church itself. In my own experience, while small amounts of money were used for charitable purposes, the lion’s share went to the maintenance of the physical plant and payment of clergy.
The government, in this country (Canada), is much more efficient in caring for the poor, and people are taxed in order to provide this care. A few fall through the cracks of course, and then there is occasionally help from churches and other religious organisations. But churches tend to favour their own, and to hold in contempt those who do not share their beliefs. Nonetheless, in my time as a priest, I occasionally got the chance to help the wayfarer to a pair of boots, a coat or a meal, and sometimes a place to stay the night. But many other people do this, and not all of them are religious.
Welfare capitalism, while it is not in good odour south of the border, is a perfectly legitimate way of using social wealth to help the less fortunate. There are doubtless a few free-riders, but in a society in which everyone is cared for, even the free-loaders (and they are few), social health is much higher than in places, such as the US, where so much emphasis is placed on the dictum of sink or swim. I have only driven through the American South once, and what I saw appalled me. People were living in conditions there which were as bad as, and sometimes worse, that the shanty towns on the edges of Indian cities. Cut-throat capitalism may require churches, but don’t forget that the believers in those churches, by and large, support cut-throat capitalism, which makes them relevant.
However, in a place where taxation is regarded as theft (as Sam Harris suggested in one of his essays), doubtless some kind of second tier system, after the government, is needed to pull up the slack. But religious help is not always without strings, and there are many people who avoid places like Sally Ann hostels like the plague, because they are considered (and treated as) less than truly human, because amongst the earth’s unfortunates.
Tim, I can’t lay my hands on the information you seek. I first saw it in a letter to a Scottish newspaper from a doctor in Glasgow (I think). This was some time ago. He wrote and referred me to the British Social Survey of a certain year, and I did not then keep records. So, I’m sorry, but this is simply written from memory. It could, indeed, be wrong, but I think my memory serves me well in this. That’s not as good as evidence, but it is the best I can do for the moment. I’m sorry. I know it is not adequate. Indeed, I thought I had kept the correspondence, but this is now two or three computers later, and my backup systems, until the last two years, have not be ideal.
A more distressing failure of proceduralism is hard to find. The heart was beating, consequences be dammed, so now we get an extra dead woman. Decent people everywhere are rightfully outraged.
I have to hope that politicians will move away from the easy support the dutifully religious and obedient provide them, over time. Until they do we are stuck with the amazingly failed policies of the Bronze Age as law. I would hope the pope and RCC would see this as another death bloodying their hands, but I doubt it. Women, after all, are a sacrifice that they have always made quite freely.
John K. The strange thing about this is that it is modern, not bronze age at all. Even Aquinas did not forbid abortion. The rule of thumb — though how they could know before the advent of modern science is another question altogether — was 40 days for a male foetus, 80 for a female: beyond those periods abortion was forbidden, but not before. The numbers, of course, represent the differential valuation of men and women, and are supposed to coincide with “ensoulment”, which was thought to occur at “quickening”.
I believe that the purpose behind this is twofold. First, it is a recognition of the scientific “fact” that when the zygote is formed, there is a new life which, after a period of development, if it is not naturally aborted, as in many cases it will be, will develop into, and, upon birth, will be a child. So the label is retrospectively applied to the zygote, its identity provided by the developmental sequence. That’s the first thing, and the thing that Catholics claim comes from science. The second purpose is that this provides the church with absolute control over women and their reproductivity, and this provides control over women, period. I believe it’s as crass as that. It’s also very emotionally very powerful stuff, especially for women who accept the idea of that they are the bearers of humanity, and the church has even managed to get women to accept, through this idea, their own subordination to their reproductive role. Many of the “pro-life” (death cult) advocates in the Roman Catholic Church are women, and, indeed, such activities keep women from meddling in “truly” important things, which is left up to the men. So, it’s at once a recognition of the discoveries of modern science, as well as a preservation, in a more absolute and robust form, of the ancient roles of men and women.
This is exactly the problem of religion. It trys to make blanket rules for everyone to follow all the time, so we don’t have to think and the church can do it for us.
But really we should examine every situation individually, and make rational decisions on how to act. Sure it is harder to think for yourself, but surely this is better than following someone elses rule book. Particularly when this rule book is at least 2000 years out of date.
Just as an aside – i just read on Wikipedia (not sure how reliable this is as a source) that the Catholic church used to distinguish between the abortion of a formed or unformed foetus, with the distinction between the two being the “quickening” at about 5 months gestation. This rule was done away with as recently as 1917.
“It makes me so angry that I want to wring some prelatical throats.”
So when are we going to do this? Not wring throats but ruffle the feathers of a few Canadian cardinals. In a post today, Jerry Coyne says, “We need more lawsuits, not more atheist conventions!” http://tinyurl.com/c63mlzr
In this case of “Mindless Idiocy of Religious Morality” we need to blog less and act more. We need to start a letter-writing campaign to send a message that we are disgusted by the fact that medical staff allowed a woman to die because “Ireland is a Catholic country.” We are disgusted by the fact that the medical staff relied on the authority of the Catholic Church rather than on medical authority and practice.
Who is we? I am hoping to be part of a large group of people (we) who will write these letters. I even volunteer to write the first or preliminary version of the letter to Canadian cardinals and bishops.
If you wish to contact me about this, feel free to email me at veronica@canadianatheist.com
Thank you Eric and palefury, I had no idea the anti-abortion tropes were so recent. It is mostly an ugly rally point for the religiously minded, I suppose.
The whole anti-choice movement may be much more politically driven that I thought. I tended to give them the benefit of desperately clinging to dogma, but if the holy books do not support their views they are engaged in much more terrifying politics and deliberate attacks on the liberty of women. I definitely need to learn more.
That’s alright, Eric. Thanks for checking.
John K. There is absolutely nothing in the Bible about abortion. Some people quote the verse “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you; before you were born, I set you apart.” (Jeremiah 1.5) But this is retrospective, not prospective. Indeed, Psalm 137, which begins so plaintively:
ends, rather less plangently, with:
The point is that, looking back, we can say, “How terrible if my mother had aborted me.” But those are empty words, for there was no “me” there at that time to abort, and had “I” been aborted, there would simply be no “me” at all. And though the zygote is certainly human tissue that will, if undisturbed, grow and be born a child, there is no “me” there until there is a unified sequence of psychological experiences that can be grasped as a unity (what Dennett calls a centre of narrative gravity). And this was, in a sense, recognised by those who thought that quickening should be the limit to allowable abortion, since at that point there was thought to be in existence, an ensouled being, an identifiable person, with a spiritual/psychological identity. But we know better now. There is no such thing as ensoulment. Persons are identifiable sequences of experiences belonging to identifiable personal narratives.
Veronica, I agree, there must be more than blogs and conferences, and of course, churches and other religious institutions have well developed organisations to work the issues in real time in public and other forums. Non-believers, though they have some organisation, because they identify themselves, very often, by a negative, do not have correlative organisations, or at least not large ones. How do you organise around a negative? So we have no “troops” who can be called to the “colours” at the slightest hint from our “Leader”. That’s something we need to look at. Certainly, writing to the bishops would be something that could be done, but do you really think they will feel it is anything more than a petty nuisance? I have written letters to Fred Hiltz, archbishop and primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, who was once my bishop, and even a friend, but he has not responded. The primate did not respond when I gave him my paper on assisted dying in response to the church’s discussion paper. The ABC answered my first letter, but did not answer the letter in which I argued my points at length. Churches are impervious to reason, in my view. The only way to get at churches is to get them where it hurts, with their membership. We must convince people that being religious is not a respectable thing to be, and for that conferences and blogs and books and other public media presences are vital.
Several commenters have noted that religions have changed their tune over abortion through the ages. See this article for a history lesson: the American Evangelicals did a 180-degree turn on the issue within living memory (for some of us, anyway):
I suspect it was a strategic move on the part of the Evangelicals to make a hasty coalition with American Catholics, in order to gain political advantage on a purely temporal plane. And it seems to have worked.
Tim, just a bit more on the stats claim about which you asked. I cannot find the private communication, but I now know, after putting all my Notabene files into a searchable database, that the original letter was in the Glasgow Herald, and that the physicians name was David Shaw, and that he referred to a British Social Attitudes Survey for a year late in the first decade of the century, probably either 2007, 2008 or 2009. But searching the Herald gets me nowhere, and I do not know which year’s survey he referred to.
Eric: Well, having a bit more information to search by does help!
Here is the original letter. It’s behind a paywall, or a “free trial subscription” wall. For those without access, here is the text of it.
Assuming this is THE letter, it doesn’t look like Shaw actually gave any numbers, or a source. Eric, you may be remembering the results of the BSAS in 2007 which showed that 80% of people supported assisted dying for terminally ill patients who were in pain.
I’ve sent an email to Dr. Shaw (hopefully I have the right one) asking him his source for the claim about those who have changed their minds. Hopefully this will bear fruit. I’ll keep you posted.
Thank you Tim. That’s the letter, and, if my memory serves me correctly, Shaw’s answer to my query was in the vicinity I record in this post. Of course, I could be wrong. Thanks for doing the search. More and more newspapers are going behind paywalls. The New York Times is now behind one, the Times has been for some time, the Globe and Mail is behind one, etc., but it’s simply too expensive to pay for them all, so news sources, and sources of editorial comment are sadly drying up. I know that newspapers are losing money, and must make it somewhere, but fifteen dollars a month for one newspaper online is simply too much.
Dr. Shaw replies quickly! He says that, if memory serves, he was referring to this study: http://jme.bmj.com/content/32/12/706.abstract
He also mentions that if you search for his name and “euthanasia” in the same journal, you’ll find three articles of his on the subject.
Eric, if by chance don’t have access to the study, just email me and I’ll send it to you.
Tim, I thought I had responded to your last comment (#24), but now see that I didn’t. Perhaps I forgot to click the “Post Comment” button. The Journal of Medical Ethics article is not the one in question, for the letter, as you will see, speaks directly of those who experienced the death of a loved one, not those who are dying, and asked if they would approve of euthanasia. My figures come, not from an article, but from my memory of Dr. Shaw’s response to my enquiry, and, in my memory at least, he referred to the British Social Attitudes Survey, but searching those archives, I do not see any evidence pertinent to this question. So, I do not know where the figures are from. However, it was an interesting bit of research, and I wish I had saved a reference to it. My searchable notes do not provide me with anything relevant. One of Shaw’s papers looks interesting, though I have not read it yet, where he speaks of the body as “unwarranted life support”!