One Door From Heaven

Maddoc, as did most bioethicists, believed in denying medical care to the elderly-defined as over sixty-if their illness would impact the quality of their lives, even if patients believed their lives were still worth living or in fact enjoyable. If they could be fully cured, but if the rate of cure was below, say, thirty percent, many bioethicists agreed the elderly should be allowed to die anyway, without treatment, because in utilitarian terms, their age ensured they would contribute less to society than they'd take.
        Incredulous, Micky read that nearly all bioethicists believed disabled infants, even those mildly disabled, should be neglected until they died. If the babies developed an infection, they should not be treated. If they developed temporary respiratory problems, breathing should not be assisted; they should suffocate. If disabled babies
        have trouble eating, let 'em starve. Disabled people were said to be burdens to society even when they could care for themselves.
        Micky felt an anger brewing different from her usual destructive rage. This had nothing to do with abuses and slights that she had suffered. Her ego wasn't involved; this anger had a cleansing purity.
        She read an excerpt from the book Practical Ethics, in which Peter Singer, of Princeton University, justified killing newborns with disabilities no more severe than hemophilia: "When the death of a disabled infant will lead to the birth of another infant with better prospects of a happy life, the total amount of happiness will be greater if the disabled infant is killed. The loss of the happy life for the first infant is outweighed by the gain of a happier life for the second. Therefore, if the killing of the hemophiliac infant has no adverse effect on others it would be… right to kill him."
        Micky had to get up, turn away from this. Outrage had energized her. She couldn't sit still. She walked back and forth, repeatedly flexing her hands, working off energy, trying to calm herself.
        Like a child frightened by and yet morbidly drawn to stories of ghouls and monsters, she soon returned to the computer.
        Singer had once suggested that if infanticide at the request of the parents will promote the interests of the family and society, then killing the child would be ethical. Further, he had stated that an infant doesn't become a person until sometime during the first year of life, thus opening the door, on a case-by-case basis, to the idea that infanticide could be ethical long after birth.
        Preston Maddoc believed that killing children was ethical up to the first indications that they were developing language skills. Say Dada or die.
        Most bioethicists supported "supervised" medical experimentation on mentally disabled subjects, on the comatose, and even on unwanted infants in place of animals, arguing that self-aware animals can know anguish, while the mentally disabled, the comatose, and infants cannot.
        Asking the mentally disabled what they think is, of course, not necessary, according to this philosophy, because they, like infants and certain other "minimally cognizant people," are "nonpersons" who have no moral claim to a place in the world.
        Micky wanted to start a crusade to have bioethicists declared "minimally cognizant," for it seemed clear that they were exhibiting no human characteristics and were more obviously nonpersons than the small, the weak, and the elderly whom they would kill.
        Maddoc was a leader-but only one of several-in the movement who wanted to use "cutting-edge bioethics debate and scientific research" to establish a minimum IQ necessary to lead a quality life and to be useful to society. He thought that this threshold would be "well above a Down's syndrome IQ," but he was quick to assure the squeamish that the establishment of a minimum IQ wasn't intended to suggest that society should be culled of the slow-witted currently alive. Rather, it was "an exercise in clarifying our understanding of what constitutes a quality life," toward the day when scientific advances would allow IQ to be accurately predicted in infancy.
        Yeah. Sure. And the extermination camps at Dachau and Auschwitz had never been constructed with the intention of using them, only to see if they could be built, if they were architecturally viable.
        At first, as she wandered through the bioethics websites, Micky thought this culture of death