By BRIAN CLOWES
Part 3
(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 start off with dispatching the terminally ill and the hopelessly comatose, and then perhaps our guidelines might be extended to the severely senile, the very old and decrepit and maybe even young, profoundly retarded children” — Dr. Mark Siegler, University of Chicago, quoted in Time magazine, March 31, 1986.
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After a decades-long program of agitation and activism, euthanasia in the form of physician-assisted suicide has finally been legalized, either in various regions or states or nationwide. The media-supported propaganda campaign that dehumanizes groups of sick or helpless people intensifies. The euthanasia pushers also add a new dimension to their propaganda campaign: Extolling the huge benefits that widespread euthanasia will allegedly provide in the form of medical advances and cost savings.
The euthanasiasts now turn their attention to consolidating and protecting their gains by entrenching them in the systems that have supported euthanasia most enthusiastically — particularly in the legal and medical professions.
They progressively eliminate all remaining restrictions on euthanasia until the elite accepts euthanasia on demand as a “basic human right.” This gives them the tools they need to beat any remaining opposition to euthanasia in the medical field into silence and cooperation.
The Third Step of the Process: Institutionalization: There can no longer be any doubt that the ultimate goal of the euthanasia movement is active involuntary killing of those “unfit” people who are either unwilling to die or who are unable to defend themselves.
Many leading pro-euthanasia groups and individuals have admitted to pursuing this goal. George Crile, MD, one-time head of surgery at the Cleveland Clinic, declared:
“To view the problem of health rationing objectively, what we need is a concept of man as a colonial creature, similar to ants and bees — which, like ourselves, are so highly specialized and so dependent on one another that no one of them can long survive alone. In the hives and homes of these bees and ants, no special care is given to the aged or infirm. Consideration is for the welfare of the colony as a whole” (quoted by Cal Thomas, The Los Angeles Times Syndicate, September 1984. Dr. Crile died in 1992.)
And psychiatrist Dr. Willard Gaylin, a co-founder of the bioethics think tank The Hastings Center (and former board member of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America), has stated: “It used to be easy to know what we wanted for our children, and now the best for our children might mean deciding which ones to kill. We’ve always wanted the best for our grandparents, and now that might mean killing them” (June 10, 1984 address to the AAUW).
Finally, Dr. John Goundry described the ultimate goal this way in 1977: “A death pill will be available and in all likelihood will be obligatory by the end of this [20th] century. In the end, I can see the State taking over and insisting on euthanasia” (The Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, August 13, 1977.)
In order to make the killing of the helpless palatable to the public, the euthanasiasts must pretend to derive some benefit from their programs. Pro-abortionists used this same tactic of distraction when introducing the RU 486 abortion pill, promising that it would cure or ameliorate a huge array of diseases: AIDS, cancers of the breast and ovaries, Cushing’s Syndrome, brain and prostate cancer, diabetes, osteoporosis, hypertension, and even obesity.
Of course, they were lying: The abortion pill has never demonstrated any promise at anything other than killing preborn children. The pro-abortionists have also repeatedly promised that fetal organ harvesting and experimentation would lead to a cascade of gigantic medical breakthroughs that would benefit millions — and yet not a single cure has been reported using fetal organ experimentations, despite billions of dollars spent on it.
Just as Nazi and Communist doctors experimented on their victims because they were going to “die anyway,” and just as abortionists used the same logic to justify fetal experimentation, a number of pro-euthanasia theorists have called for experimenting upon people who are in a comatose state.
In a 1986 Philadelphia Inquirer article comically entitled, “Proposals to Enlist the Dead in Research,” Jim Detjen reported that a “brain-dead” person might be referred to as a “neomort,” defined as: “A body sustained by artificial life-support systems to be used for drug research, development of new surgical techniques, practice for new surgeons, and as a storage place for blood and organs.”
These would be stored in “neomortoriums,” which are “places for the storage of brain-dead bodies, because such storage places would solve the dilemma of storing certain organs outside of the bodies.”
Dr. Gaylin, apparently never at a loss for ideas, would also like to see “neomorts” stockpiled in special repositories (he calls these “bioemporiums”) for organ “harvesting” and experimentation:
“The idea is based on redefining the concept of death and maintaining banks of bodies with the legal status of the dead but with the qualities we now associate with the living. We would have to accept the concept of ‘personhood’ as separate from ‘aliveness’ for adults, as we now do with fetuses. . . . Various illnesses could be induced in neomorts, and various treatments tried, thus protecting live patients from being ‘guinea pigs’ in experimental procedures and therapies. . . .
“Neomorts would provide a steady supply of blood, since they could be drained regularly. . . . Bone marrow, cartilage, and skin could be harvested, and hormones, antitoxins, and antibodies manufactured in neomorts. . . . To do this, we would have to accept the concept of ‘personhood’ as separate from ‘aliveness’ for adults, as we do now with fetuses.” (Sources: World Trends and Forecasts. “Recycling Human Bodies to Save Lives.” The Futurist, April 1976, p. 108; “Fetuses in War Testing,” Mother Jones, June 1977, p. 5.)
Terms like “neomort” are excellent examples of verbal engineering used to dehumanize and promote social engineering, just as happened with abortion and contraception.
Perhaps Dr. Robin Cook was influenced by the horrible nature of these views when he wrote his bestselling medical thriller Coma.
There is always a lethal symmetry between the pro-abortion and pro-euthanasia movements, as the late anti-life bioethicist Joseph Fletcher reminded us:
“It is ridiculous to give ethical approval to the ending of a subhuman life by abortion while refusing to give approval to the ending of a subhuman life by positive euthanasia. If we are morally obliged to put an end to a pregnancy when an amniocentesis reveals a terribly defective fetus, we are equally obliged to put an end to a patient’s hopeless misery when a brain scan reveals that a patient with cancer has advanced brain metastases.”
If the pro-euthanasia movement manages to get as far as this, its victory is almost certainly assured, because euthanasia will become entrenched and allegedly “indispensable” in the medical profession. All that remains is for the euthanasiasts to retool their media propaganda campaign. Their emphasis refocuses from pretending to care for suffering people to advocating for their outright extermination as “useless eaters.”
The propaganda also changes its primary emphasis as euthanasia as a basic human right to presenting it as a trivial matter, a settled issue, no longer really worthy of discussion.
The final article of this series will discuss this last step
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