By BRIAN CLOWES
(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 quality of life formulas described in the previous article are not just fanciful academic exercises with little relevance to real life (or death). They have already been used to kill not only individual handicapped newborn babies, but entire groups of them.
In the early 1980s, a team of four physicians and a social worker at the Oklahoma Children’s Memorial Hospital evaluated 69 babies born with spina bifida using a formula that was described in the previous article. The medical team pronounced 36 of these babies worthy of life and gave them aggressive treatment. The other 33 were pronounced unfit to live and therefore unworthy of further care.
The parents of the unfortunate 33 were consulted regarding this proposed “nontreatment,” and 24 concurred. All of their babies died of starvation and thirst after spending an average of 37 days on this hostile Earth. They were warehoused at a children’s shelter, where they were refused antibiotics and even sedation. This so-called “shelter” was subsequently shut down by the United States Department of Justice for Medicaid fraud and racketeering, after the American Civil Liberties Union and several disability groups threatened legal action.
Joseph Fletcher’s Criteria for Humanity. “Quality of life” formulas mostly involve balancing costs and benefits of individual lives on a case-by-case basis. However, we have already progressed to the point where famous bioethicists propose to simplify and streamline the process of death by classifying entire classes of people as “non-persons.” We are all familiar with the pro-abortion push to dehumanize unborn children, but some go far beyond this, classifying newborns and even toddlers as “life unworthy of life.” This is the latest iteration of the pseudo-science known as eugenics, which is defined as “the self-direction of human evolution.”
Bioethicist Joseph Fletcher, the “father of situational ethics,” has produced perhaps the most extreme example of the lethal quality of life/eugenics calculus. He drew up a comprehensive list of positive and negative human qualities that define exactly what a person is and is not. These twenty criteria are rather stringent. Two are: “Newborn babies are not self aware and therefore not human. This quality develops at about one year of age,” and “If a person lacks self control, he is on a low level of life comparable to a paramecium.”
If implemented, Fletcher’s criteria would cause more than one hundred large groups of persons to instantly lose their humanity.
These groups make up approximately one-fifth of the human population. They include all identical twins, triplets, and quadruplets; all celibate persons; the profoundly and moderately mentally handicapped; habitual drunkards and drug addicts; prisoners; all comatose persons; pro-life and pro-family activists; emotional persons; and all persons who take their religious beliefs seriously.
It seems that every advocate of euthanasia for the handicapped is able-bodied and healthy. Perhaps we should borrow a page from the pro-abortionists who say that men have no right to oppose abortion because they can’t get pregnant. We could say to these pro-eugenics and pro-euthanasia activists: “You have no right to advocate euthanasia for the handicapped unless you yourself are handicapped.”
The Next Step. Once the euthanasiasts went on record as approving the euthanasia of newborns by starvation and thirst, the obvious next step was to condemn such a practice as “inhumane” — but, instead of stopping the deaths, they called for direct euthanasia to end the suffering that they themselves had caused. Prolific self-described “obiatrist” Dr. Jack Kevorkian assisted in the suicide of more than 130 people. He said: “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. . . .”
This is precisely the same tactic used by pro-abortionists who set up illegal abortion networks like the Abortion Counseling Service of Women’s Liberation (the “Jane Collective”) and then called for abortion legalization because their own abortionists were killing and wounding so many women with botched procedures.
In the early 1970s a Down syndrome child with a small section of atrophied duodenum (which could easily have been corrected by a 20-minute surgery) was born at Johns Hopkins Hospital. The doctors decided to not “treat” this child (including the withholding of food and water), and the baby lingered agonizingly for 15 long days before dying. Referring to this case, Joseph Fletcher advocated direct euthanasia when he said:
“Some form of direct termination would have been far more merciful as far as the infant, nurses, parents, and some of the physicians were concerned. In that case, indirect was morally worse than direct — if, as I and most of us would contend, the good and the right are determined by human well-being. Indirect euthanasia did no good at all in that case, but lots of evil.”
With more and more pitiful little “unwanted” babies dying agonizing deaths, pro-euthanasia ghouls are now pushing harder and harder for direct killing. For example, the late Dr. Christiaan Barnard, renowned for his transplant of a baboon heart into a child, stated that “legalizing euthanasia, with controls, would do more to improve the overall quality of American medical care than any other single act.” This is the same person who wrote in his autobiography that one of his greatest dreams was to “. . . take a baboon and cool him down, wash out his blood with water, then fill him up with human blood.”
Another Barnard fantasy was creating a mini-Cerberus by grafting a second head onto a dog.
We know who wants direct killing, and we know that they will not rest until actual euthanasia mills are in place and making a tidy profit from human misery — just as they are in Switzerland and just as abortion mills are doing right now.
It is not surprising at all that many of the country’s leading pro-abortionists are also in the forefront of the push for killing inconvenient born human beings. The list of those who have gone on public record as supporting direct infanticide is lengthy.
They include Betty Friedan, co-founder and first president of the National Organization for Women (NOW); Larry Lader, cofounder of NARAL; Henry Morgentaler, notorious Canadian illegal/legal abortionist and past president of the Humanist Association of Canada; Planned Parenthood “sex guru” Sol Gordon; and behaviorist Dr. B.F. Skinner, past vice president of the pro-abortion Association for the Study of Abortion.
Some obstetricians with extensive practice in killing “undesirable” newborns have perfected their procedures. Obstetrical nurse Mary Arnold gave a chilling account of how involuntary euthanasia is widespread in the United States today as she recounted:
“The doctor would see the baby’s head coming out through the birth canal, realize it had Down syndrome, and signal us to let it die. The mother’s legs would be up so she couldn’t see what was going on. We would get a little wave of the doctor’s hand — a signal to us not to use suction on the baby. Then they’d say to the mother, ‘we’re just going to give you something to relax you,’ and the next minute, she’d be unconscious. When she came around, they’d say the baby had died on delivery.”
According to experts in the field of euthanasia, between 2,000 and 20,000 such instances of euthanasia happened every year in this country three decades ago. Certainly these numbers are much higher now.
The Ratchet Clicks Again. As we travel the wide and smooth road from contraception to abortion to infanticide and euthanasia, we are experiencing once again the Culture of Death’s “ratcheting effect.” The ratchet only travels in one direction. There may be short delays as the society adjusts itself to the novelty of a new deadly practice, but the process is irreversible — unless pro-lifers can initiate a major moral counterrevolution.
Once a new and immoral practice has been implemented, it quickly develops tremendous momentum. It creates a legal, medical, economic, and, above all, psychological infrastructure that immediately anchors itself to the previous strata of medical “advancement,” and it quickly becomes immovable. It cannot be uprooted without tearing away a significant portion of what has come before, and in the face of resistance, its supporters always trumpet the shopworn but effective specter of “turning the clock back on medicine.”
Eventually, the new practice is set in stone and the unthinkable becomes the commonplace. The immoral has become moral and accepted. At this point, society is ready (eager?) to embark upon the next step of “progress.”
And, of course, the more frequently such steps are taken, the easier it is to make larger, more frequent, and less thought-out steps, all in the name of “medical progress.”
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