Oh yeah, Ezekiel Emanuel promotes euthansia alright!

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I keep hearing that Exekiel Emanuel is some prophet of death. Listen to the conservatives and they will have you believe he is right up there with Adolph Hitler and the KKK, ready to go around pulling the plug on senior citizens and tossing premature babies out of the ICU. Want to know what he REALLY said about euthanasia? "The proper policy, in my view, should be to affirm the status of physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia as illegal. In so doing we would affirm that as a society we condemn ending a patient's life and do not consider that to have one's life ended by a doctor is a right. This does not mean we deny that in exceptional cases interventions are appropriate, as acts of desperation when all other elements of treatment- all medications, surgical procedures, psychotherapy, spiritual care, and so on- have been tried. Physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia should not be performed simply because a patient is depressed, tired of life, worried about being a burden, or worried about being dependent. All these may be signs that not every effort has yet been made. By establishing a social policy that keeps physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia illegal but recognizes exceptions, we would adopt the correct moral view: the onus of proving that everything had been tried and that the motivation and rationale were convincing would rest on those who wanted to end a life." "Whose Right to Die?," The Atlantic, Mar. 1997 Oh, yeah, that's the horrible deathmonger for you. First off, he says that euthanasia should be illegal. Then he says that maybe, in EXTREME cases, there should be exceptions. I ask his detractors: How many 85 year old terminal cancer patient's bedsides have you sat at, and how can you mandate that their suffering must continue against their will? And even if you DO feel that euthanasia is ALWAYS wrong (I position I can respect, though not agree with) how do you take the statement Emanuel made and extrapolate it to turn him into some kind of monster? I will have to do more research on this guy, but he certainly doesn't seem like Hitler to me.