Australian bishop Peter Elliott told mass-goers recently that the “warped practice of eugenics is rising from its Nazi tomb,” noting the “seek-and-destroy” mission for handicapped unborn children and the promotion of euthanasia. In yesterday’s post, I, too, wondered if we have learned nothing from the Nazi Holocaust and what lead to it, which reminded me of a few things I’ve come across in the past few months reinforcing my thoughts in this regard. I never posted any of them because, quite frankly, they’re pretty depressing, but I do think they’re worth noting if for no other reason than to prove that the thoughts I’ve shared here are not just the rantings of an overly paranoid pro-lifer.
1. On the BBC’s Sunday Morning Live early last month, Virginia Ironside said that, ‘If a baby’s going to be born severely disabled or totally unwanted, surely an abortion is the act of a loving mother.’ Adding
‘If I were the mother of a suffering child – I mean a deeply suffering child – I would be the first to want to put a pillow over its face… If it was a child I really loved, who was in agony, I think any good mother would.’
I’m glad to see that her outrageous comments were met with a good amount of shock and disgust, but something tells me that if this woman actually did take a pillow to the face of her own “suffering” child people wouldn’t be so quick to condemn her. Just ask Robert Latimer who gained the sympathy of a nation after he murdered his 12-year old disabled daughter, gassing her to death with fumes from his truck.
2. In Canada, a couple discovered that the child their surrogate mother was carrying would likely be born with Down syndrome and ordered her to have an abortion. The surrogate initially refused, but eventually gave in because of her own family obligations – she has two children of her own. Françoise Baylis, a Dalhousie University bioethicist nails it:
“The child is seen by the commissioning parents as a product, and in this case a substandard product because of a genetic condition”
Sick. Yet, this is exactly how roughly 90% of couples who have children prenatally diagnosed with Down syndrome react.
3. On Twitter last month Gianna Jessen had an interesting conversation with a woman (JessicaSideways) about the value of human life. They started the conversation discussing abortion and the life of the unborn, whom “JessicaSideways” denied had any intrinsic value. Then Gianna started questioning what she thought about the value of other human life (if that looks confusing, here’s a tip: it starts with Gianna’s tweet, then Jessica, then Gianna, then Jessica)
“Jessica” is not alone: in 2008 a survey commissioned by Disaboom revealed that 52 percent of Americans would rather die than live with a severe disability. Miss Sideways also said that she thought that the lives of Christians had no value because they choose to believe lies and so obviously do not care about themselves anyway.
4. The New England Journal of Medicine recently published a review lamenting the fact that the Obama Health Care law bans the use of the controversial “Quality Adjusted Life Year” or QALY. What is QALY? National Right to Life explains:
In general, a QALY assumes that a year of life lived in perfect health is worth one QALY, and that a year of life lived in a state of less than perfect health is worth less than one QALY. In a system that faces budget shortfalls, this calculation can be used to set an upper limit on the treatment that will be authorized.
This type of assessment, says NRL, is so dangerous, not only because it is being used to ration care abroad, such as by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence in the UK, but also because we see many influential American academics and health providers advocating the use of QALY. People like Donald Berwick, head of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services which runs the nation’s massive Medicare and Medicaid programs, who, in an interview with Biotechnology Health Care in 2009, praised the British system which famously uses QALY’s.
5. In August, Professor David Marsland, Professor of Sociology at the University of Buckingham, was interviewed on BBC radio for his thoughts on sterilization. It was a response to a request by a local council in the West Midlands who wanted to forcefully sterilize a 29 year old girl that they had deemed mentally unfit. In his opening remarks he said that “mental illness and acute depressive illness (including drug addiction and alcoholism) is responsible for much mistreatment of children” and that the only way to prevent the further abuse and neglect of children by these individuals, “short of incarceration”, is by forced permanent sterilization. Marsland tried to say that this kind of policy should not be associated with Nazi policies and actions and condemned Nazi “abuses of sterilization,” but that’s largely where it all started, professor. Before Hitler the United States lead the world in the forced sterilization of so-called “undesirables” and was likely a major Nazi influence.
Monsignor Ignacio Barreiro-Carambula, Interim President of Human Life International, sums it up pretty perfectly:
Our elites have established a society of contraception and abortion, wherein life itself is just another factor to be controlled at our whim. This society in turn creates more and more people who are depersonalized and marginalized, and they think that the answer to this is to simply get rid of the people whose situations we have helped to create? This is insanity.”
Also related: IVF: “The Younger Sister of Eugenics”