By BRIAN CLOWES
Part 1
(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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“Everyone has a right for suicide, because a person has a right to determine what will or will not be done to his body” — Jack “The Dripper” Kevorkian.
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The Courts: Mighty Engines for Social Change. In Nazi Germany and the Netherlands, the euthanasia movement was led by doctors. In the United States, however, it is being led by a handful of judges. Although the leadership cadre is different, the result is the same — a steady and ruthless chipping away at the right to life after birth.
The steps in the push for euthanasia in Nazi Germany and the Netherlands were crystal clear and relatively wide in their scope. By comparison, in the United States, several legal principles such as the illicitly expanded “right to privacy” and food and water as “extraordinary means” are advancing in parallel. The courts are systematically removing bricks from the foundation that supports respect for life in this nation. If enough of these bricks are removed, the entire structure will collapse, and euthanasia will be legalized without limits.
The Supreme Court of the United States, ably assisted by the courts at the federal and state levels, has decisively rejected its role as the interpreter of the Constitution and has transformed itself into the greatest engine for social change our country has ever seen.
Most people do not accept the far-left agenda because it flies in the face of common sense and basic human decency. Furthermore, most state legislatures are still close enough to the people to reflect their views. Even Congress, populated by re-election minded political animals, wouldn’t dream of enacting most of the anti-life wish list.
The United States Supreme Court started the euthanasia steamroller with its 1965 Griswold v. Connecticut decision, in which it discovered a greatly expanded “privacy right” that had somehow escaped the notice of the entire American court system for nearly two centuries. This decision held that married couples had the right to unrestricted access to contraceptives. This, of course, was soon extended to unmarried people as well as a matter of “equal treatment.”
There is, of course, a natural right to privacy, but it is reserved for licit relationships such as that between husband and wife, physician and patient, attorney and client, and priest and penitent. However, an artificially expansion of an illicit “right” to privacy is essential to the strategy of the Culture of Death and is central to anti-life thinking.
Culture of Death activists are compelled to advocate for the killing of preborn babies and bothersome newborns and adults, for a right to engage in homosexual acts, and for the right to perform other unspeakable acts. Such activities cannot be justified by any stretch of the imagination by any logical or moral means, so they must be concealed behind an artificial “right” that also allows anti-lifers to smear their opponents as somehow unpatriotic and un-American.
The Supreme Court drastically extended the privacy “right” in its 1973 Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton decisions legalizing abortion. And now, anti-lifers are using the “right to privacy” to agitate for euthanasia on demand.
Since 1973, many state courts have dealt with questions regarding passive and active euthanasia, and the overall pattern indicates an obvious and ominous shift toward the elimination of those whom the elite deem to possess lives that are “devoid of meaning.” In keeping with the principle of gradualism, this must be done one small step at a time so that the populace does not wake up to the danger until it is far too late.
Descriptions of the Euthanasia Cases. The Culture of Death always fulfills its objectives through the central strategy of slow and steady incrementalism, also known as “gradualism.” This is because the only practical way for a movement to enact its goals is not in one huge leap, but in small and nonthreatening steps. This strategy has so far succeeded brilliantly with the issues of contraception, pornography, divorce, homosexuality, and abortion.
Regarding euthanasia, Derek Humphry, founder of the Hemlock Society, acknowledged that “we have to go stage by stage, with the living will, with the power of attorney, with the withdrawal of this; we have to go stage by stage. Your side would call that the ‘slippery slope’.”
Since a large and diverse society like ours has a colossal amount of psychological inertia, it is very difficult to motivate a large group of people to take action or even to change its attitudes. Therefore, if an organization wishes to effectively stimulate social change, it must respect this inertia.
The history of euthanasia in the United States is written in a trail of bodies, each successive victim serving to loosen the criteria for assisted death.
A series of court judgments describe with crystal clarity the “slippery slope” from infanticide to passive euthanasia to active euthanasia. Since 1975, the controls over euthanasia have inevitably became looser and looser, just as they did for abortion and for contraception — and exactly as they did for euthanasia in Nazi Germany and the Netherlands. The final result will be, as pro-euthanasia organizations desire, the “right” to kill oneself at any time, for any reason, or the “right” to demand that a licensed “obitiatrist” do the job for you — at taxpayer expense, of course.
So the first major objective is the legalization of voluntary euthanasia on demand. After this goal is achieved, the euthanasia pushers will start agitating for the involuntary eugenics-based euthanasia of those who are deemed to be a burden to individuals or society. And, ultimately, we will begin eliminating “useless eaters” unless we can stop this death machine in its tracks.
Substituted Judgment. Two court cases began to lay the foundations for fully legalized physician-assisted suicide and outright euthanasia.
The first such case was that of Karen Ann Quinlan, 21, who in 1976 stopped breathing for unknown reasons and suffered irreversible brain damage. She lapsed into a deep coma, but continued to show minimal brain activity. This meant that she could not legally be declared dead, and was therefore kept alive on a respirator. Miss Quinlan’s father petitioned the Supreme Court of New Jersey to allow her doctors to disconnect her from life support.
The court complied, and ordered that Quinlan be removed from the respirator. The court’s appended opinion expanded the “right to privacy” found in the Griswold decision to include the right of patients to refuse even non-extraordinary lifesaving treatment.
Essentially, the court ruled that a patient no longer able to communicate may exercise this right through a family member or duly authorized guardian through a doctrine known as “substituted judgment,” which is based upon what family members or others thought the patient would have wanted.
Pro-lifers pointed out that no criminal is sentenced to death based upon what a friend thought he or she “might have done,” or “might have said,” but of course they were ignored.
The second major case that advanced the doctrine of substituted judgment involved Joseph Saikewicz, who had been severely retarded since birth and was confined to a mental institution. He had developed incurable leukemia, and his doctors expressed their willingness to prolong his life with standard chemotherapy. However, in 1977, his guardian asked that he not be treated.
The Supreme Court of Massachusetts found that the pain and fear that Saikewicz would have suffered in the future “far outweighed” any benefit of treatment for him. The ruling revolved upon on what the witnesses assumed he would have said if he could have spoken in his own behalf.
The court extended the Quinlan decision by stating that persons who have never been able to make judgments for themselves have the “right to die.” Later decisions in the Massachusetts High Court held that families and physicians could make such judgments without even bothering to take legal action.
The Right to Privacy Supersedes the Right to Life. One pitiful case centered on a tiny newborn baby boy (Baby Doe of Bloomington), who was born in 1982 with Down syndrome and a breathing defect that hampered his swallowing as well. The breathing defect could have been easily corrected with surgery, and literally hundreds of couples begged to adopt him.
However, the Supreme Court of Indiana ruled that his parents’ right to privacy was more important than this baby’s right to live! Baby Doe died of thirst and starvation just days before his appeal reached the U.S. Supreme Court. This heartless judgment caused so much consternation that Congress passed legislation in 1984 prohibiting the withholding of “medically indicated” treatment from disabled newborns.
A later New York judgment (the Baby Jane Doe case) ruled that parents of an infant with spina bifida and other non-life-threatening disabilities could choose to “treat” their little baby “passively” with adequate food, hydration, antibiotics, and dressings. In other words, all the parents are legally obligated to do is keep their child comfortable and hope that the little one dies.
To show how imperfect and illogical man-made laws can be, a Maryland veterinarian was fined $3,000 by the Board of Veterinary Examiners for starving a dog to death and he had his license suspended for 60 days — in the same month that Baby Doe was starved to death!
Four years later, the Florida Court of Appeals decided that “a penumbral right to privacy” (an invented right) allowed a patient or a third party acting for her to refuse artificially administered food and water, even with a state law in place prohibiting such withdrawal. This case involved Helen Corbett, a 75-year-old terminally ill and incompetent patient being sustained on a feeding tube.
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