Medicine and morality

Every granny a wanted granny

John Linklater

There is at present no provision under the NHS for gas chambers to provide a final solution to the problem of a falling birthrate coupled with a rising proportion of elderly citizens. Indeed, many will feel that it is unrealistic to think about gas chambers in Britain today, but that is because they do not realise how far we have drifted in twenty-five years. Aneurin Bevan did not make provision for separate NHS abortion chambers (or abortion clinics, as we prefer to call them). The present demand for a separate abortion service was surely beyond the wildest stretches of his imagination — as was, no doubt, the concept of a publicly advertised series of British abortion package tours. Yet these things are with us now. The most heinous medical crime of 1964 has become the most common single cause of admission to a gynaecological ward in 1974. Are we, then, quite so sure that there will be no gas chambers by 1984?

Anybody who has personal experience of looking after mongol children will know that they are happy, friendly and affectionate, and that they are easily pleasedby a little personal attention. Yet these children are now being routinely destroyed while still in the womb, if their handicap is discovered in time. For whose benefit are they killed? The thin edge of the wedge has been inserted. We already have a predictable pressure group which would go yet further and require that eugenic destruction be allowed to take place legally, not only within the womb, but also during the first twenty-four hours after delivery, so as to eradicate all those obviously handicapped children who had managed to escape the abortionist.

In these, and in many other ways, we now demonstrate that, as a nation, we have all but lost our respect for human life in turning from . traditional Christian morality towards materialistic hedonism based on a philosophy of amoral, pragmatic expediency. This loss of respect strikes at the very root of Christianity and we would, therefore, have expected that its church would have fought, tooth and nail, . and regardless of cost, at least against the social clause in the Abortion Act of 1967. But it had become soggy. Prelates who would previously have condemned now saw both sides of the abortion argument. The church chickened at . the critical point.

It is very doubtful if we can ever again rely on the hierarchy of the established church to point the way when we find ourselves in moral doubt, if we have to face the fait

accompli of an Euthanasia Act.

The established church has, in fact, created in the course of 400 years such a smooth amalgam of ecclesiastical and secular law, that many people have come to confuse morality with legality, an'd now forget that morality exists as a separate entity. This is the weakness of our traditional strength as a constitutional monarchy, and explains why so many decent citizens who, ten years ago, accepted that abortion for reasons of convenience was a crime against humanity, have now come to modify their views. They have accepted parliamentary statute as a moral arbiter.

This was why an extremist pressure group of perhaps one or two thousand abortion law reformists could, in the end, change the very mores of a nation which had lost its anchors and which was passing through its turbulent and rebellious phase of collective adolescence. We should not be too complacent that the same process cannot take place again under pressure from the Euthanasia Society and the humanist groups. We have now become somewhat hardened to the concept of taking an innocent human life, provided that certain conditions are fulfilled, and the humanists do, after all, have a controlling voice in the most powerful propaganda weapon of all time, the television screen. We have become morally numb.

When brought face to face with their atrocities committed before and during the 1939-45 war, the Germans blamed Adolf Hitler, but he had merely been the mouthpiece and catalyst, personifying the mass hysteria that was sweeping through Germany before he seized power. The concept of "releasing lives devoid of value" had originally been published by Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche in 1920 when Hitler was an unemployed nonentity, and German doctors had already, spontaneously, begun to kill mentally defective geriatric and paediatric patients well before the Nazi coup. At first they felt it necessary to destroy mentally handicapped children only if they were under the age of three but, as soon as the principle was firmly established, the age limit was raised to eighteen.

German doctors were not ordered to kill their patients. They did so spontaneously. They killed, furthermore, with the tacit connivance of the population at large, thinly disguising the enormity of their crime by the widespread use of well-understood euphemisms like "voluntary mercy death," and "help for the dying." One common phrase in Germany, before the war, was the "problem of useless mouths to feed." Equally common was that meaningless concept, having a su perficial appearance of good sense, "the right to die." They called it voluntary, and so it was — at first.

The German church, like ours, took an ineffective and desultory stand on behalf of the concept of the sanctity of life, and eventually compromised. The main difference between the two situations is that the Germans were burning with intense patriotism and preparing to seize their "living space" by waging savage war. They therefore first slew those whose presence would be an encumbrance in the war effort. We, however, are burning with intense hedonism and quite incapable, at present, of preparing for any external war. We are therefore likely to relieve our sense of overcrowding by slaying those whose presence interferes with out comfort or pleasure or sexual gratification.

Perhaps this is why we did not find it risibly ludicrous when six bishops and an archbishop all signed their names to a statement on a piece of paper with the letterhead of an organisation that sells condoms, exhorting us to pray for a reduction in population in the very year in which the national birthrate had fallen to the lowest ever recorded level of 13.7 births per 1,000 of population. 'Population Countdown' was the expression of an overcrowding hysteria, unrelated to logic or to demographic common sense.

Perhaps this is why, when Michael Litchfield and Sue Kentish so brilliantly exposed in March the gross abuses and breathtaking greed of the abortion racket as it goes on in some of the most expensive abortion chambers, justice has not yet been seen to be done: in a sense we are all tacitly conniving.

The facts must be widely known. If there were no massive connivance, we could not tolerate the existence of an advisory service in which girls are virtually always advised to pay for an abortion, often when they are not even pregnant, in which they are then escorted to their banks to get the cash, and finally operated on, all within the space of a few hours. Why do we not rise up in anger against the director of an abortion chamber who fiddles the gestation dates so as to make a mockery even of the grudging twenty-six weeks safeguard to which the unborn child is entitled? That man kills legally protected human life for financial gain, and we seem to tolerate it.

It may be that we fail to grasp the atrocity that he perpetrates because we see it subjectively, at least as human beings. I wonder what we would think, in our hearts, of a species of lower mammals, such as apes, which had developed a relatively safe technique for skewering the living young out of their bellies, in pathetic, bloody shreds, sometimes two or three times in a season, so that they could get on with their main business of random, non-reproductive copulation, usually with their own species and, mostly, with the opposite sex? How would we rate their chances of survival? Would we approve of them as pets, or would we, more likely, unanimously agree that they had thoroughly nasty habits?

The human race stands in danger. Abortion statutes, throughout the world, have swept aside strict adherence to the Hippocratic principles often, as in Britain, taking the medical profession by surprise. It is rarely feasible to set the clock back, but we must at least now ensure that we are not swept on, blindly, into further dis aster. Next month at Bucharest, for example, the United Nations World Population Conference will be dis cussing population control policy. Euthanasia angl child destruction are likely to be actively lobbied.

It is essential for the entire medical profession urgently to proclaim individual, personal adherence to some practical and acceptable modern alternative to the Hippocratic oath. Such an alternative is the Declaration of Geneva, 1948. If this is not done, and seen to be done, doctors will inevitably find them selves wielding the deadly, modern, sophisticated drugs and instru ments of their trade at the behest of political pressure groups to alleviate whatsoever ad hoc, real or imaginary, social, economic, eugenic or emotional stresses. The results would be unthinkable.

It wag with this in mind that, largely on French initiative, some 200 doctors trim many different countries assembled in Holland at Noordwijkershout on May 10, to analyse factually, without politi cal or religious bias, the world-wide trends in population control policy which the medical profession is currently required to implement, or which it may be required to implement in the near future. Abortion, was seen clearly as the trigger rather than the target. Brainwash ing, slave-labour child destruction, genocide and voluntary and compulsory euthanasia were all brought under careful, dispassionate scrutiny.

During' the conference a new, integrative organisation was founded, with a highly specific aim. It was entitled 'World Federation of Doctors who respect Human Life.' The challenge implicit in the title was intended.

The aim of the Federation was to integrate the numerous medical organisations and associations throughout the world that seek specifically to maintain the utmost respect for human life, to test the weight of medical opinion throughout the world on this issue and thus to clarify it, seeking a personal affirmation from every registered medical practitioner. It was realised that this might, at first, appear to cut across some existing channels, but the information

about progressive intentions for

Bucharest was so disquieting, and time so short, that if some such unorthodox plan had not been swiftly put into action, there might have been no means of organising an informed bulwark of medical opinion to counter the effect of predictable and mindless slogans such as 'better dead than lonely,' 'the right to relief from senility,' and 'every granny a wanted granny.'