By BRIAN CLOWES
Part 1
“The ease with which destruction of life is advocated for those considered either socially useless or socially disturbing instead of educational or ameliorative measures may be the first danger sign of loss of creative liberty in thinking, which is the hallmark of a democratic society” — Leo Alexander, MD.
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Holland: The Future Of Euthanasia
People on all sides of the issue sincerely wonder what the future holds regarding euthanasia. However, there is really no need to speculate, because history has given us two clear examples of the progress of euthanasia, both of which point to the same conclusion — that death is highly contagious.
The first predictor, of course, is Nazi Germany. But as useful as this comparison is, it was enacted under a totalitarian regime and also began 80 years ago, an eternity as measured on the time scale of social activism.
The Netherlands provides us the more appropriate predictor. The United States is now traveling the very same road as the Dutch, only we are trailing them by about 20 years.
We should very closely examine the situation in nation where euthanasia is a fact of life in order to ask ourselves a most important question: Do we really want this for our country?
A Mere Matter of Convenience and Economics. As abortion and population suppression programs spread across the world, the Culture of Death is becoming bolder and bolder in its drive to eliminate any born or unborn people it considers “useless” or who stand in the way of its self-fulfillment. All of this killing is done in the name of compassion and for the good of society, of course.
But, as we will see, pure selfishness is the most prominent motive of pro-euthanasia activists.
Euthanasia follows abortion as certainly as abortion follows contraception. When people dehumanize and then start killing unborn children, the killers can seamlessly apply their justifications to those who are already born.
This means that every pro-life activist should be familiar with the various aspects of the euthanasia issue. Students of the anti-life mentality will find it most useful to examine the situation in a country that has fully embraced euthanasia in order to become familiar with the goals of pro euthanasia groups based in other nations.
History Of The Dutch Euthanasia Program
“In 2007 I wrote that ‘there doesn’t need to be a slippery slope when it comes to euthanasia.’ Most of my colleagues drew the same conclusion. But we were wrong — terribly wrong, in fact….I used to be a supporter of [euthanasia] legislation. But now, with 12 years of experience, I take a different view” — Theo Boer, former member of a Dutch Euthanasia Committee.
After World War II. Many were deeply impressed by the extraordinary example set by the Dutch medical profession during the early stages of World War II.
In 1941, Arthur Seyss Inquart, the Reich commissar for the Netherlands, ordered Dutch physicians to participate in the Nazi selection and extermination programs. The Dutch doctors unanimously refused. Seyss Inquart then threatened to pull their medical licenses, and the doctors mailed them to him, continuing their practices in secret. Seyss Inquart finally seized a hundred of the doctors and shipped them off to concentration camps, but the remainder still unanimously refused to cooperate in the Nazi genocide.
The situation has dramatically reversed itself over the last half-century. Today it is the German physicians who are strongly rejecting euthanasia while their Dutch colleagues wholeheartedly embrace it.
Why are Dutch doctors killing their most helpless patients just a few decades after defending them with their very lives? The answer lies in the power of propaganda, and is a testimony to the extraordinary influence of the media in a modern society.
Beginning in the mid-1970s, the Dutch media launched a pro-euthanasia propaganda saturation campaign designed to break down the resistance of the medical profession and the population at large. Dutch doctors at first resisted and spoke out against the media, but the press simply destroyed the reputations of prominent anti-euthanasia physicians. Eventually, the viewpoints of these doctors were entirely suppressed.
This media bombardment has influenced the Dutch public most profoundly, and demonstrates its incredible ability to replace reasoning and logic in the minds of the people with knee-jerk emotion and the herd mentality in half a generation.
Just 15 years after media launched its blitz, 76 percent of the Dutch public supported voluntary euthanasia, claiming that it is supposedly the ultimate in “freedom of choice” — but, paradoxically, 77 percent also support involuntary active euthanasia, which is the ultimate denial of freedom of choice. Chillingly, more than 90 percent of Dutch economics students supported the compulsory euthanasia of entire classes of people deemed to be a “burden to society” for the purpose of “streamlining the economy.”
As in Nazi Germany and today’s USA, the compliant media are playing their vital part in pushing a one-sided view of euthanasia in the Netherlands. Dutch journalist Gerbert van Loenen has studied in detail Dutch documentary films that praise euthanasia without presenting even the possibility that an alternative view may exist.
Van Loenen says: “They [media members] do ask certain questions. But they systematically ignore most critical questions, so that the general public is presented with an opinion that is completely good, and has no risks. This is contagious. I’m afraid the situation in the Netherlands is out of control.”
Dr. Julius Hackethal revealed the root cause of the Dutch problem at the Hemlock Society’s Second National Voluntary Euthanasia Conference — its complete abandonment of a code of ethics:
“Sorry my English is not good enough….I studied that [Hippocratic] oath exactly. The conclusion of my Hippocratic Oath study is: ‘A more bad physician’s oath doesn’t exist!’ One sentence of the patient hostile Hippocratic Oath is: ‘I will never give anyone a deadly poison, not even at their request, nor will I give them any advice as to a deadly poison.’ But it doesn’t apply for the last 50 years. Today I judge such an oath to be an act of unmedical patient hostility, an act of inhumanity” (emphasis in the original).
The 1980s. In June 1984, the board of the 30,000 member Royal Dutch Society of Medicine (the Dutch equivalent of the American Medical Association) approved a “Position on Euthanasia” paper that supported legalizing both voluntary active and involuntary active euthanasia. This move was supported by the Supreme Court of the Netherlands.
Shortly thereafter, the European Community’s Committee on Medical Ethics unanimously rejected the Dutch medical society’s radical proposals on euthanasia, stating: “We hope that this strong reaction will induce our Dutch colleagues to reconsider their move and return to the happy communion of utmost respect for human life.”
Predictably, Dutch serial killer doctors ignored this “strong reaction.” By 1990, the vast majority of Dutch anesthesiologists flatly refused to take part in surgery on Down syndrome children. By that time, Dutch hospitals starved at least 300 handicapped newborns to death each year, and cardiologists refused to treat any person over the age of 75.
As always, when an evil is accepted, it expands effortlessly. It not only strongly resists any attempts to place even the most trivial limits on it, but strikes back hard at those who try to oppose it.
For example, a three-month-old Dutch boy born in 1990 with spina bifida and hydrocephalus fell ill for a few days, and his parents and doctor decided to euthanize him. One of his nurses opposed this decision, and she and her husband went to the parents and offered to adopt him, but the little one was killed by lethal injection anyway.
The only punishment the courts meted out for this cold-blooded murder was inflicted on the nurse who tried to rescue the baby, because, by involving her husband, “she violated professional confidentiality.”
The 1990s. In 1991, the Dutch government released a report on the country’s euthanasia situation. The two-volume work, titled Medische Beslissingen Rond Het Levenseinde (popularly known as the Remmelink Report), reported that 92 percent of all reported cases of Dutch euthanasia violated the already permissive “limits” set by Dutch courts.
Dutch doctors only committed 200 acts of euthanasia within legal “limits” annually, and the commission found that at least 2,400 illegal mercy killings and assisted suicides happened each year. The commission estimated that doctors committed a total of about 9,100 legal and illegal mercy killings and assisted suicides (both reported and unreported) in the Netherlands each year, which was equivalent to seven percent of all deaths in the country at the time.
The report added the more than 1,000 annual victims of involuntary euthanasia to the total number of mercy killings, and found that more than 23,000 patients had their lives “significantly shortened” by overdoses of pain killers each year. Of these, 3,700 overdoses were given with the specific goal of shortening or ending life.
But this desperate situation was only the beginning. As we shall see, euthanasia soon “burst the dike” and spread over the Netherlands with no limits whatsoever.
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