A Merciful End: The Euthanasia Movement in Modern America by Ian Dowbiggin (Oxford University Press, 272 Pages)
In A Merciful End: The Euthanasia Movement in America, Dowbiggin examines the Euthanasia movement by gaining access to the files of the Euthanasia Society of America, the first Euthanasia group in the U.S.
By examining the files, the meeting minutes, and the records of the ESA and by investigating the lives and statements of those involved in their leadership, he establishes that the public policy of the Euthanasia movement and their actual intent were different.
The public policy of the Euthanasia movement was to push for the legalization of voluntary Euthanasia. Their private policy was to promote cases for involuntary euthanasia of people with disabilities and incompetent persons after voluntary euthanasia was made legal.
Dowbiggin starts by explaining that the euthanasia mentality was born in the mid to late 19th century in connection with eugenics, positivism, social Darwinism and scientific naturalism. “The most pivotal point in the early history of the euthanasia movement was the coming of Darwinism to America.”
Darwinism gave rise to the eugenics philosophy. Eugenics is “the science of improving the stock.” Dowbiggin explains that by 1920 the U.S. was the most eugenic nation. The American Eugenics Society was founded in 1923 and by 1933 they were able to pass eugenic sterilization laws in 41 US states (and most Canadian provinces). Usually eugenics is associated with Nazi Germany‚s policies, but the Germans were not alone.
Charles Francis Potter, founder of the Euthanasia Society of America in January 1938, also co-founded the first Humanist Society of New York in 1929 which included as its members John Dewey, Albert Einstein, Julian Huxley, Thomas Mann, George W. Rappleyea (of the John Scopes defense team).
Potter believed the legalization of euthanasia would be the crowning glory to a life already dedicated to eugenics, birth control, world peace, the emancipation of women, and the defeat of Christian fundamentalism.
Potter viewed people with disabilities as needing to be “mercifully executed by (the) lethal chamber.” He also stated that: “It is simply social cowardice that keeps (imbeciles and idiot infants and monsters‚) alive.” Potter recommended safeguards, including legal and medical permission and a waiting period. Yet there was no mistaking his opinion that euthanasia was a tax-saving, utilitarian, and biologically necessary public policy.
Another early euthanasia campaigner was Dr. Inez Celia Philbrick. To Philbrick, euthanasia, eugenics, and birth control were equally women‚s issues. Philbrick wrote, besides being a “merciful” method, “in its social application the purpose of euthanasia is to remove from society living creatures so monstrous, so deficient, so hopelessly insane that continued existence has for them no satisfactions and entails a heavy burden on society.”
The early euthanasia movement received much of its funding from ESA co-founder Ann Mitchell. Mitchell was a wealthy New Yorker who had been hospitalized from 1934-36 at the Bloomingdale asylum as a mental patient. Mitchell urged the ESA to sponsor a “monster birth bill” which she said would attract younger women to the euthanasia movement.
Foster Kennedy, a neurologist, succeeded Potter as the ESA President in 1939. He believed that the most urgent need was to legalize euthanasia for the severely mentally retarded – what he called “nature’s mistakes” – and not for “normal adults, who having become ill are going down into the shadows.” He stated to the New York press in 1939 that it was “absurd and misplaced sentimental kindness” that kept society from mercy killing “a person who is not a person.”
Dowbiggin explains how the knowledge of the Nazi euthanasia program didn’t change the attitudes of the ESA leadership. Dowbiggin states that, “Even as reports of Nazi barbarism were reaching the United States, the Euthanasia Society of America struck a committee in 1943 that included Potter and birth control activist Jean Burnett Tompkins to draft a bill legalizing involuntary euthanasia for “idiots, imbeciles, and congenital monstrosities.” Because the news from Europe grew grimmer, nothing came of the project. But it did indicate the Euthanasia Society of America members had few qualms about euthanasia for the non-consenting person with disabilities.”
Led by Paul Blanshard, many ESA board members were also publicly anti-Catholic. They viewed the Catholic Church as the greatest impediment to legalized euthanasia. Blanshard also condemned the Catholic Church for frustrating attempts to enact eugenic sterilization laws.
Dowbiggin clearly points out that Blanshard always claimed they were attacking Church leadership rather than lay Catholics … the fact that they saved their animosity for Catholicism rather than the medical profession, an equally stalwart opponent of euthanasia, signaled an inability to liberate themselves entirely from long-standing American anti-Catholic sentiment.
The modern euthanasia movement continues to quietly promote eugenic and involuntary euthanasia.
Joseph Fletcher, the father of “situation ethics” also believed in eugenic sterilization as a means of curbing the fertility of the mentally handicapped and involuntary euthanasia which he justified for “an incorrigible human vegetable” whether spontaneously functioning or artificially supported, (who) is progressively degraded while constantly eating up private or public financial resources in violation of the distributive justice owed to others.”
In the late 1960’s a new thrust began with the creation of the field of bio-ethics. This led to the question of when does life end. Brain death criteria were being developed which effectively re-defined death.
In 1969, Chicago human rights lawyer Luis Kutner reintroduced the living will which had been invented in 1949 by the ESA. Sales of the Living Will allowed the ESA to grow significantly especially due to its promotion by Abigail Van Buren (Dear Abby).
In 1973 psychiatrist Florence Clothier who worked for the ESA at promoting the “living will” stated in a letter that she was in favour of physicians “actively terminating the life of an infant with no hope of anything except a vegetative institutional existence.” She stated that it was “Far better for (the parents) to believe that their hopelessly defective handicapped baby was born dead or died soon after birth.” She advocated this action for “mongoloid babies, severe cerebral palsy, extreme physical deformities, etc.”
In 1976 Rockefeller met with officials from both the Concern for Dying (CFD) and the Society for the Right to Die. He expressed particular interest in “active euthanasia” for the terminally ill and severely disabled infants.
Finally in 1998, Derek Humphrey promoted the Duty to Die. He has stated that America‚s elderly are “putting a strain on the health care system” by consuming dwindling funds that could be spent on other, healthier patients. In an era of cost containment in medical services, Humphrey foresaw physician-assisted suicide as a solution to “the emotional, physical, and economic toll of the dying experience.”
Dowbiggin has effectively connected the leadership of the euthanasia movement to that of the eugenics movement. He refers to the questions of eugenics, euthanasia, birth control and abortion as the four taboos. These movements shared the same leadership, philosophy and donors.
Thanks to Ian Dowbiggin the euthanasia movement cannot deny a strong association with a eugenic philosophy, a frequent distaste for people with disabilities and a common support for involuntary euthanasia of the elderly, chronically ill, people with disabilities, and disabled newborns.
Ian Dowbiggin, has written a ground-breaking book on the Euthanasia movement in America. Every group, library or reader who is concerned about end of life issues, disability rights or the sanctity of human life should have this book.
