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 on euthanasia, e-mail him at bclowes@hli.org.)
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“We say if you prohibit something, everyone will do it. If you don’t you can keep it at a certain level. Euthanasia is the same thing” — Hans Roell, Dutch Voluntary Euthanasia Society.
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The first step in the overall pro-euthanasia strategy mostly consists of “preparing the ground” with a media propaganda campaign which continues throughout the four-step process. This program dehumanizes certain helpless groups of people, such as the mentally handicapped and victims of severe neurological diseases. The purpose of this is to gradually convince the public that allowing such people to suffer is “inhumane,” and that opposition to euthanasia is cruel and the result of “outdated religious dogma.”
The euthanasiasts also claim that such artificially prolonged suffering is a terrible waste of scarce health-care resources that could better be put to use helping those who have a realistic expectation of having an adequate “quality of life.”
The Second Step: Legalization. The second major step is the legalization of passive euthanasia in at least a handful of states, so that a challenge to remaining anti-euthanasia laws may eventually be taken to the Supreme Court. This strategy worked brilliantly with abortion and homosexual “marriage,” and euthanasia proponents have good reason to believe that it will work a third time.
However, we must understand that passive voluntary euthanasia — the withholding of food, water, and oxygen — is only an intermediate goal. People who have been denied the necessities of life will die in agony over a period lasting up to two weeks.
Pro-euthanasia activists point with pretend horror to this process (which they themselves initiated) and say, as Jack Kevorkian did, that “allowing someone to starve to death and to die of thirst, the way we do now, is barbaric. Our Supreme Court has validated barbarism. The Nazis did that in concentration camps….It took her [Nancy Cruzan] a week to die. Try it! You think that just because you’re in a coma you don’t suffer?”
This is the same strategy used by pro-abortion feminists who operated “underground railroads” to funnel women to illegal abortionists — and then ran to the press, simulating outrage that these same abortionists were killing and maiming those same women. The general plan is to deliberately generate a dangerous situation where people are hurt and killed committing illegal acts, and then demand that the acts that you yourself facilitated be legalized.
The pro-euthanasia lobby in the United States is currently pushing “physician-assisted suicide” or direct voluntary euthanasia, where the patient or his “attorney in fact” asks that the patient be killed by injection. This type of direct killing was proposed in Washington State’s Initiative 119, which voters rejected in November of 1990.
But Jack (“The Dripper”) Kevorkian has already made this second step a reality. The retired Michigan pathologist assisted in the suicides of more than 130 people, and made it perfectly clear that he wanted to establish a chain of euthanasia “clinics” (what he called “obitoriums”) across the country.
The only reason he was stopped is that he became boastful and overconfident. On September 17, 1998, he made a videotape showing him directly euthanizing Thomas Youk with a lethal injection and daring the authorities to prosecute him — which they actually did, to his shock and outrage.
Another of the world’s leading pro-euthanasia activists, the German Dr. Julius Hackethal, presented a talk at the Second National Voluntary Euthanasia Conference of the Hemlock Society, in which he stated that the ultimate goal is a worldwide “right to die”:
“Your [Hemlock Society] congress will help that the self-evident human rights for a dignified death will become a fixed and steady law all over the world. Such a vested human right would automatically cause that everybody would be able to determine for himself at what time and in which way he wants to die.”
One critical point that must be emphasized concerns the United States Constitution. As we learned with contraception, abortion, and ersatz homosexual “marriage,” when the courts invent a brand-new so-called “fundamental human right” for one group of people, it is unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause to deny that same right to other groups of people. This means that, if incurably ill people receive a “right” to euthanasia, the courts will inevitably expand that “right” to include every citizen of the United States.
As ethicist Tibor Machan pointed out, “Why confine the right to suicide, assisted or not, to the infirm?…Limiting the right to assisted suicide to the sick and disabled is, in fact, unjust discrimination.”
Pro-abortionists first agitated for the abortion “right” under the “hard cases” of rape, incest, and fetal deformity, and within five years expanded them to include any reason whatever and at any time during pregnancy. Right now, euthanasiasts are justifying euthanasia for the “hard cases” of terminally ill and comatose people and for those suffering unbearable pain.
They propose to expand the “right” to euthanasia so that anyone of any age will be able to kill themselves with the “aid” of a “death doctor” or “obiatrist” for any reason whatsoever, as is now happening in Belgium and the Netherlands.
Dehumanizing the Victims. As part of the second step of the overall strategy, pro-euthanasia groups continue to prepare the public by telling everyone that the targets of their programs are not really human beings — just as pro-abortionists did fifty years ago (and still do) with unborn children. Pro-abortionists dehumanize preborn children by calling them “clumps of cells,” and euthanasiasts use the same language.
One law professor claimed that “a determination of death is a legal determination that a collection of living cells is no longer entitled to the rights granted to human beings, rather than a scientific or medical determination that all biologic life has ended.”
It is also interesting to note that, just as the preborn are being referred to as “pre-human,” those in a coma are now commonly referred to by physicians as “post-human.”
A classic example of this dehumanization involved Nancy Cruzan, a woman who was severely injured and incapacitated by a car crash. Before she could be killed, it was necessary to dehumanize her. Dr. Fred Plum, chief of neurology at the Cornell New York Hospital, expertly performed this task. During court testimony, he referred to her as a mere “collection of organs” and an “artifact of technological medicine.”
In an interview with writer Nat Hentoff, a physician observed that Nancy was the “moral equivalent of a biopsy from Nat Hentoff’s arm,” and asserted that her “legal personhood” should be removed so she could be disposed of or experimented upon without the bother of having to go to court.
In a world where all except healthy white Catholic males are considered to be seriously handicapped in one way or another, some “New Age” liberal death pushers would like to strip protection away from those human beings who are genuinely handicapped. This is obviously necessary in order to kill the handicapped, because, in the old world governed by Christian ethics, the handicapped are deserving of respect and protection — not death.
In support of this view, syndicated columnist Ellen Goodman wrote:
“Indeed, one of the most striking new impressions from the [PVS] conference is how the language of ‘disability’ is being applied to those in a persistent vegetative state. It’s being used in courtrooms against families who want to stop treatment of the unconscious and let them die. It’s being used by advocates such as James Bopp of the National Legal Center for the Medically Dependent and Disabled, who accuse families like Ryan [Amerman]’s and Christine [Busalacchi]’s of ‘discounting, devaluing life based on disability.’
“There is something not only deceptive in this, but cruel. To describe a PVS patient as disabled is, as ethicist George Annas put it, ‘to describe a Minnesota blizzard as precipitation.’ To use funds intended for those who can benefit on those who cannot is somewhere between perverse and immoral.
“There are indeed slippery slopes. But patients in a persistent vegetative state are not people with a reduced quality of life. They are people with no quality of life. We have to look squarely at this reality.”
Of course, pro-euthanasiasts also take advantage of the ever-present desire of health-care bureaucrats to cut costs as much as possible. As one physician claimed:
“As director of intensive care in a community hospital, I squander millions of dollars on patients too elderly or ill ever to return to meaningful function….We must face the-un American fact that not all individuals’ remaining lives have equal value. Value should be assessed…on how their survival enriches or drains their family and community.”
The third step in the grand plan of the euthanasiasts is institutionalization. This involves eliminating remaining restrictions after legalization, get direct euthanasia entrenched at all levels of society, and continue the propaganda campaign to prepare the public for the final step.
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