Euthanasia: Medical Murder

Dr. Peggy Norris is a British medical doctor who was in practice with her husband for 31 years. Her work caring for victims of concentration camps after World War II, awakened her interest in medical ethics. Dr. Norris is a Founder and charter member of the World Federation of Doctors Who Respect Life. She has sponsored a number of conferences on medical ethics and edits a quarterly newsletter for the British Medical Education Trust.

Nowadays euthanasia is defined as the killing of a sick person by a doctor, (supposedly) at his or her request. It is the one story that is guaranteed maximum media and news coverage worldwide. The killer is praised for his courage and humaneness, whilst the victim is “fortunate” to have been released from a “useless, poor quality” life — which was also proving to be an economic and emotional drain on hospital and social services and the family; not to mention the patient’s estate or family finances. Thus everyone benefits except the corpse.

The killer is particularly favoured because to date none of the corpses have returned to testify as to whether their death experience was a willed — for happy release or a nightmare as the trusted physician administered the poison.

In June 1990, an unemployed pathologist, Dr. Jack Kevorkian and his suicide machine got the full media treatment when he killed a 54 year old woman in the back of his specially- equipped 1968 Volkswagen van 2,000 miles from her home in Oregon. She had Alzheimer’s disease. Kevorkian and his machine were shown on English and Irish television and in the newspapers. He must have been pleased with the publicity as promoter “in a national campaign of planned death.”1

We live in strange times. The eminent psychiatrists who supervised the 2 minute killings in the gas-filled cyanide cells at Hadamar Mental Institute in Germany were condemned to death at Nuremberg in 1945. Yet over forty years later we are embracing their solutions to rid society of the financial and emotional burden of caring for our newborn handicapped, sick and aging patients.

Following the Nuremberg trials the Council of the British Medical Association (BMA) analyzed how German doctors, with their world-wide reputation for excellence, implemented the eugenic and racial hygiene policies of the German state. Within the analysis, the BMA reported:

They (the doctors] departed from the traditional medical ethic which maintains the value and sanctity of every individual human being… they betrayed the trust society had placed in them as a profession … it is to be assumed that initially they did not realize that the ideas of those who held political power would lead to the denial of the fundamental values on which Medicine is based. Research in Medicine as well as its practice must never be separated from eternal moral values. Doctors must be quick to point out to their fellow members of society the likely consequences of policies that degrade or deny fundamental human rights. 2

This document outlined principles for inclusion in a Charter of Medicine, and recommended that these should be part of the graduation ceremony for physicians. The principles included “the duty of curing, the greatest crime being cooperation in the destruction of life by murder, suicide and abortion.”3

Within 20 years British psychiatrists drafted “A Memorandum on Therapeutic Abortion.” It included “general measures to regulate population growth” and abortion for the handicapped. “This ground is likely to be beneficial to society” and also for “Patients with a degree of subnormality who might be feckless or inadequate.”4 So mental hygiene and population control were to creep back into Medicine.

Nine months later on April 27, 1967 the David Steel Abortion Bill was passed — and Britain had its infamous Abortion Act. It was almost identical to the psychiatrists’ memo, though population control and mental hygiene were not even hinted at. But the cornerstone of medical ethics was rejected, and the entire edifice has been crumbling ever since.

It was a major victory for Secular Humanism and the utilitarian ethic. With population control of the unborn it would only be a matter of time before attempts to legalize euthanasia would be resurrected.

In 1938, in the United States of America, the National Society for the Legislation of Euthanasia was founded by Dr. C. F. Potter, President of the first Humanist Society. He said this new organization was an extension of their work in promoting birth control and “since that fight is largely won, we feel free to transfer our efforts to the euthanasia enterprise.”5

English supporters included Havelock Ellis, Julian Huxley and H.G. Wells. Later in 1938 the society became the Euthanasia Society of America. The professor of the Department of Neurology at Cornell Medical School, Dr, Foster Kennedy, became President. The Society proposed a bill to legalize voluntary euthanasia. But Kennedy favoured involuntary euthanasia for newborn “defectives who could not be cured.”6

The following year, 1939, 5,200 mentally and physically handicapped children were killed in Germany.7 A Reich committee and a number of doctors, who never saw the patients in the mental institutes, marked off the forms submitted for selection of those to be killed. To soften public opinion and quiet rumours, propaganda films on the cost of maintaining “hopeless” cases were made. Then to promote euthanasia, a film “Ich Klage An” (I Accuse) was made. It portrayed a devoted doctor and his wife who had multiple sclerosis. He killed her when she requested death. The family doctor who was opposed to euthanasia was won over when he discovered how severely handicapped a baby was, whom he had treated at birth. The baby was not shown. The jury found the doctor/husband not guilty. One member — a retired Prussian major — said “the State which demands from us the duty to die, must also give us the right to die.”8 This has become the “modern” slogan used by the death promoters.

It was believed that this German film was made to counter a fierce attack on the killings in the mental institutions by the Roman Catholic Bishop of Muenster, Clement, Count Von Galen. He denounced “euthanasia” from the pulpit on August 14, 1941. People began to realize what was going on.

However, as memories of the Holocaust and World War II faded, the people controllers once again emerged from the woodwork. Dr. H. Pitney Van Dusen stated at a meeting in 1968, “Euthanasia is concerned with the responsible termination of life. The more we can relate these two movements (Planned Parenthood and Euthanasia) practically, the better.… we’ve added death control to birth control as part of the ethos or lifestyle of our society.”9

The killing of the sick has a long history. Professor Jerome Lejeune reminded us at an international conference in Miami in April 1989 that in the Middle Ages cholera victims were burned in their houses to prevent the spread of this plague and those with rabies were suffocated. Fortunately for us Pasteur accepted the challenge to fight rabies and discovered a cure. Now we have come full circle, as euthanasia societies world-wide use the AIDS plague to promote their cause. In Holland 11.2% of AIDS patients die by active euthanasia.10

Throughout the centuries doctors have implemented the policies of the population controllers and the eugenicists, and they are in the forefront now of pre-natal and genetic screening as well as euthanasia. How wise Hippocrates was when he and his followers realized doctors must be restrained within a strict code of practice. They would have to abandon their role of witch-doctor and dedicate their efforts exclusively to fight disease, and to treating and respecting those under their care regardless of race, or creed. It was a revolutionary code in an era when people were bought and sold and put out on the mountains to die. Hippocrates understood that doctors — like other human beings — were far from perfect and were in a position of power over the sick. So it was essential that this power be subject to a rigid code of ethics.

Officially medical associations have rejected euthanasia. A British Medical Association Working Party, set up to “reconsider its policy on euthanasia” concluded: “The law should not be changed and the deliberate taking of a human life should remain a crime. This rejection of a change in the law is.…[an] affirmation of the supreme value of the individual, no matter how worthless and hopeless that individual may feel.”11

The World Medical Associations Declaration states: “Euthanasia, that is the act of deliberately ending the life of a patient, either at his own request or at the request of close relatives, is unethical.”12

The public should press their Universities and their Medical, Schools to reintroduce the U.N. Declaration of Geneva1948 into the graduation ceremonies of medical schools. Meanwhile We must all expose the nonsense of the doctrine of the Right-to-Die. Once suicide was decriminalized the cry went out ‘You must obey my Living Will and NOT TREAT ME.” If doctors no longer know whether treatment is appropriate or not, it is time we got a new breed of doctors rather than allow them to kill the sick.

Lastly, fewer children are born nowadays, so we have an aging population. This gives rise to the constant reference to the financial and social burden and poor quality of life of our elderly citizens. A memorandum from the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare suggested that the adoption of “LIVING WILLS” (refusing treatment) would save Medicare 1.2 billion dollars annually.13 In Britain Age Concern’s report “The Living Will: Consent to Treatment” (dissenting to treatment is meant) referred to “economic costs to individual patients and to the State.”14 World Wide the euthanasia societies promote Living Wills. The Dutch have a plastic card, nicknamed “a credit card for easy death.”15

The public must fight State anti-life policies and MUST HEED THE WARNINGS of two physicians: Dr. Christoph Haufland (1762-1836) and pediatrician Dr. R. B. Jones, regarding the quality of life. Dr. Haufland stated:

If the physician presumes to take into consideration in his work whether a life has value or not, the consequences are boundless and the physician becomes the most dangerous man in the State.16

Dr. Jones amplified these concerns:

[T]hat life should exist is no longer enough — the quality of that life must conform to the standards set by society .… The problem … is what to do with those who do not conform to society’s norms. In the case of the newborn ‘handicapped’ baby .… one answer is … this is a medical decision — only a physician skilled in evaluating the newborn is in a position to decide, or advise the parents what to decide. This is nonsense. Whether or not a patient will benefit from a particular line of treatment … at a particular time is a medical matter. Whether a child should be fed and nurtured, or sedated and starved to death is no part of a doctor’s brief.17

Endnotes