American Public Health Association Goes Postmodern

Facts don’t matter any more, only narratives. And now this deconstruction of reality is infecting biology and medicine.

I have previously described here and in my other writing about how the term human embryo has been redefined from a scientific understanding, meaning the human organism from day one through the eighth week, into a political one—meaning that “it” (whatever it is) only becomes an embryo after implantation. This was done, as pro cloner and ESCR Princeton biologist Lee Silver wrote on page 39 of Remaking Eden, with a specific purpose in mind:“I’ll let you in on a secret. The term pre-embryo has been embraced wholeheartedly by IVF parishioners for reasons that are political, not scientific. The new term is used to provide the illusion that there is something profoundly different between what nonmedical biologists still call a six-day old embryo and what we and everyone else calls a sixteen-day-old embryo.”

And it works. The media goes along and soon an embryo is no longer an embryo, meaning that it is no longer a human organism, meaning it isn’t human life, meaning we can use it like a corn crop.

Now, the American Public Health Association has agreed to assisted suicide advocates’ insistence to redefine the descriptive and accurate term “assisted suicide” into the euphemistic and politicized “aid in dying.” LB-06-02 End-of-Life Choices—Urges health educators, policy-makers, journalists and health care providers to recognize that the choice of a mentally competent, terminally ill person to choose to self-administer medications to bring about a peaceful death is not ‘suicide,’ nor is the prescribing of such medication by a physician ‘assisted suicide.’ Urges terms such as ‘aid in dying’ or ‘patient-directed dying’ be used to describe such a choice.”

This is pure politics, of course. It isn’t medicine. And it isn’t health.

We are entering a Salvatore Dali surreal world. Words mean nothing other than what we want them to at the moment, and this is changeable from moment to moment. Clocks run backwards. Up is down and east is west. The moon is made of blue cheese, if that serves our purposes. And the basic institutions of society are being steadily corrupted.