Thursday, October 15, 2009

Cass Sunstein: You Have No Constitutional Right to Your Own Body Parts

The Obama administration doesn't need to reduce the population by establishing "death panel" rationing of health care, defunding Medicare, or driving fixed-income elderly into poverty with crushing taxation.

No.

It would suffice merely to create a world in which people no longer want to live:

Via World Net Daily:
TEL AVIV – President Obama's newly confirmed regulatory czar defended the possibility of removing organs from terminally ill patients without their permission.

Cass Sunstein also has strongly pushed for the removal of organs from deceased individuals who did not explicitly consent to becoming organ donors.

In his 2008 book, "Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness," Sunstein and co-author Richard Thaler discussed multiple legal scenarios regarding organ donation. One possibility presented in the book, termed by Sunstein as "routine removal," posits that "the state owns the rights to body parts of people who are dead or in certain hopeless conditions, and it can remove their organs without asking anyone's permission."

"Though it may sound grotesque, routine removal is not impossible to defend," wrote Sunstein. "In theory, it would save lives, and it would do so without intruding on anyone who has any prospect for life."

Note: In case you are wondering where these wacky ideas come from, wonder no more. At the risk of losing friends, I will point out that Sunstein is a 1978 magna cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School and is now that school's Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law (on leave). For 27 years, Sunstein taught at the University of Chicago Law School, where he continues to teach as the Harry Kalven Visiting Professor. Another constitutional law product of Harvard Law School and former lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School is none other than Barack Obama.


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