Culture Of Life 101… The Bridge Between Abortion And Euthanasia

By BRIAN CLOWES

Part 2

(Editor’s Note: Brian Clowes has been director of research and training at Human Life International since 1995. For an electronic copy of chapter 23 of The Facts of Life, “Euthanasia,” e-mail him at bclowes@hli.org.)

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“The doors began to open for me and my ideas once a wonderful thing happened — Roe v. Wade” — Derek Humphry.

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Court transcripts reveal that we are killing newborn people for exactly the same reasons that we have been killing preborn people for so long. B.D. Colen, one-time medical writer for Newsday Magazine, says that “The decision to withhold or withdraw treatment from extremely sick, premature, and/or deformed newborns is probably being made at least once every day by anguished parents and doctors in one of the nation’s more than 500 intensive care nurseries.”
There are three critical characteristics that tie abortion and euthanasia together so intimately that they really cannot be separated. These are the identical utilitarian worldview of the perpetrators; the identical tactics used by both the pro-abortion and pro-euthanasia movements; and the intimate relationship of the “bridge” issue — infanticide — to both abortion and euthanasia.
Abortion as Legal Foundation. The courts are now using the (in)famous Roe v. Wade decision to justify not only the killing of preborn people under the right to privacy, but born people as well.
In 1985, United States District Judge Thomas Jackson ordered a respirator removed from 71-year-old Martha A. Tune at Walter Reed Army Hospital. He wrote that “in the Roe case, the court proceeded upon the premise that a competent adult has a paramount right to control the disposition to be made of his or her own body. This [Roe v. Wade] abortion decision was instructive for purposes of this case.”
Mrs. Tune died five hours after her respirator was removed.
The following year, the judge in an abortion clinic trespass case baldly acknowledged that preborns are human beings, but went on to say that their murder is sanctioned by the state. Judge Bruce Bach spoke of state-sanctioned killing in his opinion:
“I will find as a matter of fact that unborn human lives were being terminated in the clinic that morning because that’s what the evidence in this particular case is. And I am not a medical doctor. All of the evidence is that first trimester fetuses are human beings….I reject the defense of necessity because we have in our society many instances of, I’ll call it, State-sanctioned killing of human beings. And while the evidence is that human lives are being terminated, the Virginia statutes clearly allow the termination of human lives in the first trimester.”
Getting Down to the Deadly Basics. Pro-abortionists have mostly abandoned their insupportable allegation that preborn children are not human beings. Pro-lifers have even watched abortion clinic staff on the witness stand say words to the effect of “Yeah, it’s a baby. But so what? Abortion is perfectly legal.”
This hideous attitude is terrifyingly common among more and more people as our society becomes progressively desensitized to killing. A 1992 interview with an abortion mill employee helps bring this trend into clear focus:
Interviewer: “Oh, so as long as you make money, it doesn’t matter?”
Clinic Employee: “As long as it’s food in my stomach, no, it doesn’t matter. It is legal….It is legal….It is legal!”
Interviewer: “So if they legalized killing four-year-old children, you would have no problem?”
Clinic Employee: “No, I would not have a problem….My conscience is very clear. . . .”
A graphic statement by Dr. Magda Denes illustrates this growing genocidal mindset among pro-abortionists:
“I do think abortion is murder — of a very special and necessary sort. What else would one call the deliberate stilling of a life? And no physician involved with the procedure ever kids himself about that. . . . What difference does it make what we call it? Those who do it and those who witness its doing know that abortion is the stilling of a life.”
Many other utilitarians seem to have completely shed all pretenses of humanity and humaneness as they compare sick human beings to animals. In some cases, they consider some persons to be less worthy of life than animals. Animal rights activist Peter Singer is one of these:
“If we compare a severely defective human infant with a nonhuman animal, a dog or a pig, for example, we will often find the nonhuman to have superior capacity, both actual and potential, for rationality, self-consciousness, communication, and anything else that can plausibly be considered morally significant. . . . Some nonhuman animals are more like normal humans than are some more seriously damaged members of our own species….We cannot justifiably give more protection to the life of a human being than we give to a non human animal, if the human being clearly ranks lower on any possible scale of relevant characteristics than the animal.”
Celebrities, usually heavily anti-life in their outlook, are also jumping onto the “bandwagon of death” as they simply jettison all pretenses about the nature of abortion. One of these was the late Norman Mailer, who is certainly honest in his attitude towards the preborn:
“Let me say something that’s shocking. I am perfectly willing to grant that life starts at conception. If a woman doesn’t want to have a child, then I think it’s her right to say no. But let’s not pretend that it isn’t a form of killing.”
The same blindness and duplicity inherent in the pro-abortion movement is part of the warp and woof of the pro-euthanasia movement as well. Those who advocate death by starvation for newborn babies cringe at the thought of capital punishment — yet the probability of executing an innocent man or woman is much more remote than the probability of executing a perfectly healthy newborn baby due to a mistaken diagnosis.
In just one such execution of a healthy baby, reporter Mike Taibbi describes a case “. . . where a premature infant was allowed to die at the urging of a neurosurgeon who mistakenly diagnosed anencephaly (the absence of a brain). An autopsy showed there was a brain . . . which had the characteristics of prematurity, but which was perfectly formed.”
The same pro-abortionists who condemn Jehovah’s Witnesses who refuse medical treatment for their children are curiously silent when a perfectly healthy newborn baby like the one described above dies a hideous and lingering death from starvation and thirst.
Contrast this repulsive attitude toward perfectly innocent newborn babies to that of Dr. Victor G. Rosenblum, who said:
“If we really believe in love, and find that a baby will be born having no arms, we would say, ‘Baby, we are going to love you. We will make arms for you. We have many new skills now for doing this. And, Baby, if these arms don’t work, we will be your arms. We will take care of you. You can be sure of that. You are one of us, a member of our human family, and we will always love you’.”
But that Isn’t All: The other similarities between the pro-abortion and pro-euthanasia strategies are not only striking — they are urgent and compelling.
We have already seen the similarities in strategy and tactics used by the pro-abortion and pro-euthanasia movements, and they show that these anti-life movements have proceeded along identical tracks over their entire development. The only difference is that the pro-euthanasia movement trails the pro-abortion movement by about three decades.
One of the most obvious tactics shared by the pro-abortionists and the euthanasiasts is the identical slogans. They worked very well for abortion, so why not dust them off and use them to obtain a “right” to kill born human beings?
The pro-abortionists said that they have a right to control their own bodies. So do the pro-euthanasia people.
The pro-aborts claimed that they had a paramount “right to privacy.” So do the euthanasia pushers.
And the pro-abortionists said that there were so many illegal abortions happening that we might as well make the procedure legal. So are the euthanasiasts, including Dr. Frank M. Guttman of Canada, who “suggested that legal mercy killing and infanticide is necessary because it is happening anyway and legalizing it would encourage more respect for the law” (quoted in National Right to Life News, April 1979).
Perhaps these tactical similarities are not too surprising when we find that a large percentage of pro-euthanasia leaders have been active in the pro-abortion movement for years, and have found that the same strategies that worked so brilliantly in their push for abortion are now working just as well as they lobby vigorously for euthanasia.
Journalist Nick Thimmesch noticed that the same people who pushed so hard for abortion are now lobbying for the destruction of adult human life when he wrote in Newsweek that “it bothers me that eugenicists in Germany organized the mass destruction of mental patients, and in the United States pro-abortionists now also serve in pro-euthanasia organizations. Sorry, but I see a pattern.”