It's Not Only About Terri Schiavo, Barriers to Killing Come Down

[Guest guest]

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0348/hentoff.php

 

Nat Hentoff

It's Not Only About Terri Schiavo

Barriers to Killing Come Down

November 21st, 2003 1:40 PM

 

 

var zflag_nid= " 167 " ; var zflag_cid= " 225/16 " ; var zflag_sid= " 2 " ; var

zflag_width= " 250 " ; var zflag_height= " 250 " ; var zflag_sz= " 10 " ; ');} else if

(_version ');}// -->

 

People already have the right to refuse unwanted treatment, and suicide is not

illegal. What we oppose is a public policy that singles out individuals for

legalized killing based on their health status. This violates the Americans With

Disabilities Act, and denies us equal protection of the laws.

 

Disability opposition to this ultimate form of discrimination has been ignored

by most media and courts, but countless people with disabilities have already

died before their time. —Not Dead Yet: The Resistance, a disability rights

organization, Forest Park, Illinois, October 28, 2003

 

 

 

 

 

 

In 1920, a prominent German lawyer, Karl Binding, and a distinguished German

forensic psychiatrist, Alfred Hoche, wrote a brief but deadly book, The

Permission To Destroy Life Unworthy of Life. In his new book, The Coming of the

Third Reich (Penguin), Richard Evans notes that Binding and Hoche emphasized

that " the incurably ill and the mentally retarded were costing millions of marks

and taking up thousands of much-needed hospital beds. So doctors should be

allowed to put them to death. "

 

Then came Adolf Hitler, who thought this was a splendid, indeed capital, idea.

The October 1, 2003, New York Daily News ran this Associated Press report from

Berlin:

 

" A new study reveals Nazi Germany killed at least 200,000 people because of

their disabilities—people deemed physically inferior, said a report compiled by

Germany's Federal Archive. Researchers found evidence that doctors and hospital

staff used gas, drugs and starvation to kill disabled men, women and children at

medical facilities in Germany, Austria, Poland and the Czech Republic. . . .

 

" The Nazis launched the drive to root out what they called 'worthless lives'

[and 'useless eaters'] in the summer of 1939, pre-dating their full-scale

organization of the Holocaust, in which they killed 6 million Jews. " (Emphasis

added).

 

The more than 200,000 " worthless lives " terminated by the Nazis before the

Holocaust included few Jews. Most of those killed were other Germans considered

unfit to be included in " the master race. "

 

Among the defendants at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders and their primary

accomplices in the mass murder were German doctors who had gone along with the

official policy of euthanasia. An American doctor, Leo Alexander, who spoke

German, had interviewed the German physician-defendants before the trials, and

then served as an expert on the American staff at Nuremberg.

 

In an article in the July 14, 1949, New England Journal of Medicine, Dr.

Alexander warned that the Nazis' crimes against humanity had " started from small

beginnings . . . merely a subtle shift in emphasis in the basic attitude of the

physicians. It started with the acceptance, basic in the euthanasia movement,

that there is such a thing as life not worthy to be lived. " That shift in

emphasis among physicians, said Dr. Alexander, could happen here, in America.

 

Actually, the devaluing of apparent " imperfect life " had begun years before, in

the United States. Various academics, in and out of the medical profession, had

successfully advocated and instituted a eugenics movement—the perfecting of

future generations of Americans by deciding who, depending on their hereditary

genes, would be allowed to have children. The unfit would no longer be permitted

to reproduce.

 

These American eugenicists provided German proponents of a " master race " with

inspiration. As Robert Jay Lifton wrote in his invaluable book The Nazi Doctors

(Basic Books), " A rising interest in eugenics [in America had] led, by 1920, to

the enactment of laws in twenty-five states providing for compulsory

sterilization of the criminally insane and other people considered genetically

inferior. " (Emphasis added).

 

Paying attention in Germany, Heinrich Himmler, one of Hitler's executioners,

said the Nazis were " like the plant-breeding specialist who, when he wants to

breed a pure new strain . . . goes over the field to cull the unwanted plants. "

Under the Nazis, there were eugenics courts to decide who could have children.

In the United States Supreme Court (Buck v. Bell, 1927), Justice Oliver Wendell

Holmes, ruling that 18-year-old Carrie Buck should be involuntarily sterilized,

famously wrote:

 

" If instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them

starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit

from continuing of their kind. . . . Three generations of imbeciles are enough. "

Only Justice Pierce Butler dissented.

 

In this country, the eugenics movement lost its cachet for a time because the

Nazis had gone from sterilization of the disabled to herding the religiously,

racially, and politically unfit into gas chambers.

 

But there has been an American revival of eugenics in certain elite circles. A

few years ago, an archconservative who had talked with some of the present-day,

would-be purifiers of the American stock told me they were delighted at the

deaths from AIDS of homosexuals.

 

But to protect the disabled from " mercy " killings, as well as eugenicists,

another movement was forming here. Not long before he died, Dr. Alexander read

an article in the April 12, 1984, New England Journal of Medicine by 10

physicians—part of the growing " death with dignity " brigade. They were from such

prestigious medical schools as Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and the University of

Virginia. These distinguished healers wrote that when a patient was in a

" persistent vegetative state, " it was " morally justifiable " to " withhold

antibiotics and artificial nutrition (feeding tubes) and hydration, as well as

other forms of life-sustaining treatment, allowing the patient to die. " They

ignored the finding that not all persistent vegetative states are permanent.

 

After reading the article, Dr. Alexander said to a friend: " It is much like

Germany in the '20s and '30s. The barriers against killing are coming down. "

 

Next week: The growing conviction among American doctors, bioethicists, and

hospital ethics committees that it is " futile " to try to treat certain patients,

and therefore, medical professionals should have the power to decide—even

against the wishes of the family—when to allow these valueless lives to end.

 

If the courts finally permit the husband of brain-damaged Terri Schiavo to

continue to press for her death by starvation—by again removing her feeding

tube—more of the barriers to killing may come down in other states. So this

isn't only about Terri Schiavo. It could be about you.

 

 

 

 

 

NEW WEB MESSAGE BOARDS - JOIN HERE.

Alternative Medicine Message Boards.Info

http://alternative-medicine-message-boards.info

 

 

 

Free Pop-Up Blocker - Get it now