In a CP report in the Kamloops Daily Sentinel, May 14, 1983, Dr. William Jory, outgoing president of the BC Medical Association, angrily denounced abortion and euthanasia.
“Is it right that in Canada each year, 65,000 embryonic Canadians are flushed down the sluices and toilets of this country?” Dr. Jory asked the association’s annual convention in Kelowna.
“This is a staggering total of unfulfilled human life that equals the death toll in the great atomic attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.”
Jory asked why so many today “rightly speak out against the horrors of nuclear warfare yet see life in its earliest forms dispatched so summarily even in a very sanitary manner?
“History shows that the euthanasia programme, the therapeutic removal of life from this world, began two years before Adolf Hitler came to power in 1931, when some Bavarian psychiatrists advocated the sterilization of the chronically mentally ill. From this small step arose a policy of genocide.
“In similar fashion, we have to realize that policies that seem eminently reasonable, or arguable today, but do not recognize the sanctity of life, are policies that will not only lead to the erosion of medical ethics but will undermine some of our most basic principles.
“To us as physicians, the message is clear: the sanctity of life rises above all else.”
The 200 doctors listening to Dr. Jory’s farewell speech reportedly received it “with only polite applause.”
