From Classical Values:
Josh Chafetz at OxBlog asks whether this report (that Idi Amin seeks kidney donor) is a sick joke.
It sure sounds like a sick joke to me. For once, in this very limited instance, I have to express agreement with Dr. Leon Kass -- who opposes organ transplantation.
No human organs should go into that guy!
Lots of human organs have already gone into Mr. Amin, kids -- right through his digestive tract.
On a more serious note, I had no clue that Dr. Kass is against something so miraculously routine as organ transplants. This is the guy President Bush put in charge of his bio-ethics commission? No wonder he's against cloning research -- he can't even adide the thought that a 12-year-old with a congenital heart defect might live long enough to actually experience, you know, life.
As someone who lost a father waiting for a heart donor, lost a best friend after a failed marrow stem cell transplant, and has another friend who might need a kidney someday. . .
Well, I still hope that Dr. Kass never finds himself, or a loved one, in the position I've seen up close too many damn times already.
Right on, Stephen. My father has no colon, and his bladder is mostly scar tissue now. In theory, it should be possible to clone replacements for these organs and transplant them into him, and I'm sure that sort of procedure will be routine someday. But thanks to fools like Kass, my father will not live long enough to benefit from it.
I think it would only be fair, then, for Kass to have not only a DNR order, but a refusal to participate in any sort of medical procedure whatsoever. No surgery. No drugs. Nothing. It's all... so! UNNATURAL!
Plus, the sooner he kicks the bucket, the better for humanity.
So "Dr. Kass is against something so miraculously routine as organ transplants"?
VodkaPundit links to Classical Values, who links to FuzzyBelly, who quotes InstaPundit (with a link that doesn't work) as saying Kass "is uneasy with transplant technology". Not the same thing at all. Nobody quotes Kass himself, BTW.
Google shows Kass as opposing "the buying and selling of human organs" (quoting his 1985 book. Toward a More Natural Science) and he supposedly called transplantation itself "a noble form of cannibalism" (unsourced cite in National Review). These two positions--pro-organ donation, anti-organ sale--are pretty much the mainstream.
So call off the lynch mob, huh?
