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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Before any act of euthanasia, infanticide, or suicide may be carried out, the killer (and sometimes the victim) must perform some kind of assessment of the value of the life of the “candidate” for death.
Eugenicists and euthanasiasts believe that the worth of a person’s life is the sum of his worth to himself and to society. This is the total benefit that the person can produce. On the other side of the equation, the value of the services required to keep him alive are the costs of that person’s life. So, they say, if the costs of maintaining a particular person’s life exceed the benefits he can provide, he should die.
This forthrightly utilitarian concept — which dehumanizes a person to the point of treating him like a product or a machine — can only work in a God-ectomized society, because Christians believe that every human life is infinitely precious in the eyes of God. The only way a society can arrive at the point where it is coldly applying benefit cost analyses to persons — or even groups of persons — is if God is expunged from the equation.
The Feds Evaluate Life. After 51 construction workers died in a 1978 power plant accident at Willow Island, W.Va., the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) proposed new safety rules that were projected to cost the energy industry about $27.3 million per year. OSHA estimated that these new guidelines would save 23 lives annually.
OSHA considered these regulations to be economically feasible, because the agency at that time valued a human life at $3.5 million. This meant that the resulting cost-benefit ratio of the regulations was (23 X 3.5)/27.3 = 2.95 (so, every one dollar invested would return $2.95 in “lifesaving” benefits).
President Ronald Reagan’s Executive Order 12291 of February 17, 1981 ordered all federal government programs to formulate a cost-benefit ratio before writing new regulations. Although the executive order was not directly intended to include an assessment of the value of a human life, federal agencies were nonetheless obliged to produce the best number they could in order to perform analyses involving the potential loss or saving of human lives. There was simply no other way to quantify the viability of measures designed to safeguard the lives of workers.
Euthanasia-related “quality of life” calculations are entirely different from assigning a fixed value to human life as federal agencies do, because the government’s reason for assigning a value to life is associated with trying to save or protect life. Pro-euthanasia “quality of life” criteria are invariably involved in attempts to end life.
It is interesting to see what average values various federal agencies now place on a human life for their analyses. The United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) values a person’s life at $14.48 million. Both OSHA and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) put this figure at $16.68 million. The lowest value for a human life adopted by any federal agency is $9.90 million by the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC).
Once again, it is only fair to point out that there has to be some value assigned to a human life in order for these agencies to do their work and make decisions that affect us all, hopefully for the better.
The “Doctors” Speak — Again. It seems that some people consider themselves exempt from the rules that bind the rest of us mere mortals. In particular, certain physicians believe that they are so Godlike in their wisdom that they can ignore the lessons of history with impunity.
The American medical profession is following precisely the same road that the Nazi physicians did, as we saw previously. The first step the Nazi doctors took was to assign a fixed monetary value to handicapped human life. And now American doctors are doing exactly the same thing.
In 1990, two researchers estimated that about $2.6 billion is spent annually in this country on neonatal intensive care. The tiniest preemies stayed in intensive care units for an average of 137 days and at a cost of $158,800 per infant at that time. According to the researchers, “Once physicians and parents, together, have collaboratively agreed to a strategy for treatment or nontreatment, this ought not to be subject to arbitrary veto by interested third parties, whether pro-life lobbyists or federal bureaucrats.”
A little basic arithmetic shows that the authors were casually condemning about 16,400 newborn babies to death every year.
Infanticide is certainly nothing new to the United States. In 1963, Johns Hopkins University Medical School doctors delivered a baby suffering from Down syndrome and a minor intestinal blockage, which would have been easily correctable by surgery. With the full approval of the parents, the medical staff opted for “nontreatment” and let the helpless little baby starve to death over a period of two weeks.
The Nazi euthanasia program began with infanticide as well. This program was called Aktion T4, for the location of its planners, #4 Tiergartenstrasse in Berlin. Doctors and midwives were ordered to report any child born with disabilities or deformities, and the Nazi doctors would take the child from the parents and take him or her to an institution where the child would be evaluated and judged by a panel of three doctors, who almost always found the child to be Lebensunwertes Leben (“life unworthy of life”).
The doctors would consign the child to death by starvation or lethal injection, draw up a death certificate listing the cause of death as “pneumonia,” and deliver the baby’s body back to the parents — minus his or her brain, which was kept for study and experimentation.
Until his death in 2005, Nazi doctor Heinrich Gross, who supervised the murders of hundreds of these children, and who boasted of “the greatest collection of brain specimens,” was a respected physician living in Vienna, and was frequently called as an expert witness in trials involving brain disorders.
Another Nazi doctor, Hermann Pfannmüller, preferred the “simple and natural” method of cutting back rations a little more each day (to less than 100 calories) until small handicapped children simply starved to death.
Author Fredric Wertham describes Pfannmüller’s methodology:
“In the children’s ward were some 25 half-starved children ranging in age from one to five years. The director of the institution, Dr. Pfannmüller, explained the routine. ‘We don’t do it with poisons or injections, our method is much simpler and more natural.’ With these words, the fat and smiling doctor lifted an emaciated, whimpering little child from his little bed, holding him like a dead rabbit. He went on to explain that food is not withdrawn all at once, but the rations are gradually decreased. ‘With this child,’ he added, ‘it will take another two or three days’.”
Unwanted newborns die exactly the same deaths in intensive care units in the United States every day — the only difference being that they are never touched.
Why Do Doctors Need “Quality” Criteria? If we are going to efficiently exterminate a large class of people, we must have an impeccably scientific justification for doing so. This process includes assessing the worthiness of individual people to live.
The technique is different when applied to “candidates” for abortion. No quality of life criteria is necessary. If the mother doesn’t want the baby, the baby dies. It is as simple and as inhumane as that.
For euthanasia, a mathematical formula or other pseudo-scientific means must be applied in order to give the public the impression that the experts are doing some serious thinking and analysis regarding the outright murder of human beings.
This process makes direct euthanasia palatable to the more pliable segments of the public, who know that killing people is wrong. The formulas, however, give the murders a veneer of scientific respectability, thus giving people a handy excuse for inaction and soothing their consciences.
The most popular means of determining if a life is “worth living” is to apply a mathematical procedure to the person.
One example is the popular “quality of life” formula concocted by Dr. Anthony Shaw, a pediatric surgeon: QL = NE(H + S), where QL = Quality of life; NE = Natural endowment of the candidate for life; H = Required contributions by home and family; and S = Required contributions by society at large.
Note that the formula’s parameters are rubbery and vague. They can be adjusted at any time to fit any situation to reach the preordained judgment.
These various formulas are not restricted to the killing of individuals. As we shall see in the next article, they can also be applied to entire groups of handicapped human beings.
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