Editorials:
Steinfels, Margaret O'Brien
Editorials Heads in the sand When it comes to water quality, there is no substitute for the real thing. That is why the House vote last month (240-185) to gut parts of the Clean Water Act was...
...Implicit in the AMA's recommendation is the view that the anomalous character of the anencephalic infant means that he or she does not constitute protectible human life...
...In this instance, watered-down standards fashioned in usually hateful Washington will be allowed to trump all others-no states' rights issue here...
...If they are born dying anyway, why shouldn't their body parts be used to save the lives of others, especially other infants...
...Legal prohibitions, technical problems, and moral repugnance had stayed the hands that would kill a dying infant in order to take those organs-until now...
...Instead, he invited lobbyists from the chemical and paper industries...
...For though these infants do not have brains, they do have hearts, lungs, livers- organs that some surgeons and pediatricians want to harvest for transplant...
...That is a powerful tide that legislators ought to be made aware of...
...But for some, like Congressman Bud Shuster (R-Pa...
...According to Virginia Wetherell, secretary of Florida's Department of Environmental Protection, the bill "undercuts much of our progress and creates new problems without solving old ones...
...Challenges them by posing absolutism beyond (or beneath) frameworks, points of view and eyes-of-behold-ers, forcing Jules [born-again hit man] to question his own comfortable framework, something Vincent [doomed Big Kahuna skeptic] never does...
...Today medicine can still do nothing/or them, but some medical practitioners would like to do something to them...
...On the contrary, whatever meaning the life of an anencephalic infant has must be encompassed in the few days that it lives- not in the days, months, years that its organs live in others...
...The 1972 law has produced a dramatic turnaround in the quality of this nation's water supply...
...That is why he excluded the Environmental Protection Agency-which he calls an "environmental Gestapo"-from giving testimony in drafting the new House bill...
...Clearly, some environmental regulations have proven impractical...
...In survey after survey, 70 percent of Americans favor current or stronger legislation to protect the environment...
...Is changing the definition of a wetland to suit political expediency...
...Exceptions to the current brain-based definition of death laws would have to be changed to accommodate this practice...
...The invocation of the Big Kahuna challenges the ironies of nominalism (it's all in the name) and ethical relativism (it's all in the frame) that have been flickering back and forth in the Quarter Pounder dialogue," Rosenbaum asserts with considerable mustard...
...Possibly...
...State legislatures should resist such efforts...
...That's not the way to maintain- let alone improve-the nation's once and future water quality...
...What I love about Quentin Tarantino's screenplay is how apparently throwaway time-passing dialogue often embodies tricky theological questions," Rosenbaum writes...
...The United States must not let its leadership in this area evaporate...
...That is why the House vote last month (240-185) to gut parts of the Clean Water Act was so short-sighted and thickheaded...
...One man's theodicy being another moviemaker's lurid campy epic, Jules, Vincent, Quentin, and Ron all deserve a break today...
...In the past twenty years, taxpayers have spent over $75 billion to upgrade sewage treatment, and the manufacturing sector has poured in billions more...
...their input had a powerful legislative impact...
...Removing a beating heart from a still-living human reduces life to a mere utilitarian calculus...
...According to Rosenbaum, a conversation between two professional killers about what a McDonald's quarter pounder is called in France "is ultimately about the relativity of systems of value...
...Both the National Academy of Sciences and the National Conference of State Legislatures vigorously opposed the provision...
...It weakens present standards for dealing with industrial waste, and limits states in imposing stricter standards than the federal government's...
...who sponsored the House bill, the costs exceed the benefit...
...If it is prudent, regulations should be refined and perhaps relaxed...
...ET CETERA HOME OF THE WHOPPER Writing on "Evil's Return" (when did it leave...
...Let the Senate take heed and the White House stand firm...
...FIRST, DO NO HARM Anencephalic babies, babies born with a brain stem but without a cerebral cortex, usually die within a few days of their birth...
...The House bill ends mandatory federal standards on storm-water pollution-the runoff from factories, mines, mills, and city streets-and makes the program voluntary...
...At least one meaning the rest of us need to reckon with is that the life of an infant who will live only briefly, who demonstrates few signs of personhood, nevertheless deserves our respect as a human being, and the care and dignity that entails...
...Whereas less than 40 percent of waters evaluated by states in 1972 met water-quality standards, by 1992 that figure had risen to over 60 percent...
...Until recent years, their condition was treated with care and comfort...
...in the New York Times Magazine (June 4), Ron Rosenbaum praises the well-known theologian Quentin Tarantino, writer and director of Pulp Fiction, a film of unsuspected metaphysical depth...
...Won't this give their brief lives meaning they otherwise lack...
...Since nearly every other word in Pulp Fiction is a four-letter word, the theologically inclined wait with tongue-piercing anticipation to see how Rosenbaum will pull this particular decapitated rabbit out of Tarantino's notoriously blood-filled top hat...
...nothing medically could be done for them...
...Democratic nations have taken the lead in protecting and maintaining the environment, and the Commonweal 16 June 1995:3 improved environmental quality in the newly democratic countries of both Eastern Europe and the Far East (such as Taiwan and South Korea) is a matter of record...
...Clean water has not come cheap...
...This "accomplishment for posterity" was achieved by exerting vigorous control over sources of water pollution, public and private...
...But like Michael Jordan and Larry Bird in those McDonald's TV commercials, it sounds like Rosenbaum has tried to bank in this bravado shot from the top of the Sears Tower, bouncing it off Calvin, Kant, Mario Cuomo, and Alvin Plantinga, and reaching for "nothin' but net...
...Congressman Shuster says that last November's election was a mandate to rein in "top-down government regulations, and clean water is one of the areas crying out for reform...
...that is one reason to safeguard it...
...But recently a committee of the American Medical Association has concluded that it is ethically permissible for doctors to take such organs if the parents ask to donate the infant's organs and if the diagnosis of anencephaly is confirmed by two experts not part of the transplant team...
...The House bill also reduces the number of designated wetlands-those sites so critical in the natural process of water purification-by as much as 50 percent...
...This connection is made explicit when a Big Kahuna Burger-as in the Big Kahuna-is alluded to by a hit man who regards his salvation during a shootout as an act of divine intervention...
...But is allowing factories and treatment plants to do less than they do now the solution...
Vol. 122 • June 1995 • No. 12
