Voluntary euthanasia
Sir: As an American traveller of Chinese descent, I was most interested to read your weekly, but was most disconcerted to see a plea for euthanasia by Mr Beverley Nichols (February 8). It took me right back to 1938 when the Euthanasia Society of America, stimulated by the British example which naturally insisted on "only voluntary" methods, actually proposed compulsory euthanasia for "monstrosities and imbeciles"; a practice which in recent times has sent a number of German doctors to prison under retrospective war-crimes legislation.
In 1920 Binding and Hoche published a widely acclaimed book, Release of the Destruction of Life Devoid of Value, urging the elimination of "worthless People", ostensibly on grounds of compassion, but mainly to end the economic burden to the community of the helpless and allegedly incurable. In 1939 the Nazis implemented the first experiment when four mental patients Were gassed with carbon monoxide, the same lethal substance used in the early months of the concentration-camp gas-chamber programme. That initial trY-out led to the installation of gas-chambers in mental homes at Grafeneck, Brandenburg, Hartheim, Sonnenstein, Hadamar and Bernburg. Between 1939 and 1946 at least 275,000 patients were "mercifully killed". These included incurables, deaf-mutes, neurological cases, epileptics, World War I limbless, children from psychiatric clinics, mongoloids, and even children with non-Aryan ears and bedwetters. Children termed "difficult to educate" were eliminated either by injections of drugs or starvation. , Many aged thus removed did not live in mental hospitals, but were sought Out from their homes by psychologists Who would suggest they be placed under the guardianship of the state; the Process was favourably propagandised by film and literature. Thousands of n°rinal men and women allowed their Parents to be killed, especially as it was a time of scarcity. None dared call it Murder then. Not till after the Nuremberg trials. Nowadays the national-socialist approach is back. Dr Robert H. Williams in July 1970 proposed in Northwest Medicine that "planning to prevent overpopulation must include euthanasia". In England, a Nobel Prizewinner is reported as urging compulsory death for everyone at eighty as part of a new ethical system base, on modern science." In 1973 Physician-legislator, Dr Walter Sackett, urged that $5 billion could be saved in the next half-century if the ntongoloids of Florida state were Permitted to succumb to pneumonia,
d that up to 90 per cent of the patients in state hospitals for the entally retarded should be allowed to
o The campaign has been given a boost y the abortionists, whose elimination of unWanted babies does not rest on the
c_ortsent of the human victims either. Dr
Glanville Williams in The Sanctity of ife and Criminal Law advocates .i.,ortion and euthanasia hand-in-hand,
urging humanitarian infanticide and
As anasia for handicapped children. ab Dr Frank Ayd, an authority on cirtion and euthanasia, says: "The pro gress of the law on abortion gives sub sub _n stance to the fear that euthanasia ° ce legalised would be similarly eXPancled."
"Once you permit the killing of an unborn child," observes Dr R. A. Gallop of Toronto University, "there will be no stopping .... Your children will kill you because you permitted the killing of their brothers and sisters. Your children will kill you because they will not want to support you in old age . . If a doctor will take money for killing the innocent in the womb, he will kill you with a needle when paid by your children."
Dr Paul Marx, sociologist at St John's University in Minnesota, says euthanasia thinking, if unchecked, will lead to wholesale "termination" of the terminally ill, aged, retarded, insane and genetically disadvantaged, not to mention "involuntary experimentation on helpless members of these groups; compulsory sterilization; the use of so-called 'human vegetables' as living organ banks for transplants . . ." No doubt, just as murdering undelivered babies is called 'termination of pregnancy,' these innovations will be called 'termination of senility' or of insanity!
Professor Yale Kamisar, a liberal writing in Minnesota Law Review, also points out that if widespread political persecutions are legitimate considerations in other areas of the law, "then why should the prospects of the police state and the systematic extermination of certain political or racial minorities be taken any less seriously when we enter the sickroom ... when we discuss 'euthanasia' under whatever trade name?"
These moral issues seem to me more important than your departure from the Common Market. Has Mr Powell lectured the Archbishop of Canterbury on them yet?
C. M. Fou PO Box 11321, St Louis, Mo 63105, US
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