The Centre for Life Understanding
The following is Part 3 of a 6-part article. Originally published in The Canadian Messenger of the Sacred Heart, Toronto in 1980, reprinted here with permission.
part 3……..
“If the physician presumes to take into consideration in his work whether a life has value or not, the consequences are boundless and the physician becomes the most dangerous man in the state.”
Dr. Christopher Hufeland (1762-1836)
The Marriage and Family Newsletter (1977) on euthanasia was written by Dr. Jose Espinosa. In it, Dr. Espinosa recalls the story of a psychiatrist in upper New York State who was involved in a serious accident and had to spend a period of time in an intensive care unit. The surgeons taking care of him realized that they finally had a medically educated patient who could evaluate their practices and techniques. When the psychiatrist improved, they asked him. “How does it feel being hooked up to all that machinery with all those tubes coming in and out of every one of your orifices? How do you feel being taken care of in that manner?’ The psychiatrist responded, “I had a little fear and a big fear. My little fear was that I hoped that those working in that unit knew how all those machines worked. “And what was your big fear,” the surgeons asked. The psychiatrist responded,
“My big fear was that I hoped that nobody in the unit had read my article on the Right to Die!”
In the same issue of the newsletter, Espinosa tells us that the ethical guidelines of the Americain Medical Association begin by stating that the physician’s main responsibility is to humanity. This is to be distinguished from the Hippocratic tradition wherein the patient is the primary responsibity of the physician. Dr. Espinosa claims that this slight shift in emphasis has as consequence the acceptance of any manipulation of the individual which might “benefit humanity.” He goes on to say, “Hitler’s effort to purify the race and get rid of the ‘undesirables’ would be in accordance with the principles of the AMA.”
If you think this may be an exaggeration, you would be well advised to read the book A Sign for Cain by Dr. Fredric Wertham. This book is considered a modern classic on the subject of violence Chapters 7 and 8 have been reprinted under the title The German Euthanasia Program (1978).
Dr. Wertham tells us that the euthanasia program in Germany was a chapter in the history of violence, as well as a chapter in the history of psychiatry. The particular type of violence dealt with in these chapters is impersonal and bureaucratic, according to Wertham. He claims that those who ordered, commissioned, and organized the program as well as those who executed it had extremely little feeling for their victims, be it sympathy or hate.
Wertham also tells us that psychiatrists completely reversed their historical role in passing death sentences. The resultant deaths were not mercy deaths, but merciless deaths. The program was a model of the most bureaucratic mass murder in history. It was the attacking of a social problem by violence. The psychiatric patients were the first victims. The psychiatrists became the legislators who put forth the rules; they were the administrators who worked out the procedures, procedures, provided the patients and places, and determined the methods of killing; they pronounced a sentence of life or death in each individual case; they were executioners who carried out the sentences – without coercion; they supervised and often watched the slow deaths. No doctor was ever ordered to participate in the program. The rationale was essentially economic and socio-politcal – the cost of care for the temporarily “unproductive” and the prosperity and glory of the nation. The programs started in early 1930s long before Hitler came to power, but they were continued by the Nazis until 1945.
Compulsory sterilization was the forerunner of the mass killing of psychiatric patients (including children). Victims included foreign civilians, orphans, the aged, the handicapped, Jewish mental patients, prior to 1940, were not worthy to receive psychiatric euthanasia.
Where did the ideas for these programs come from? Dr. Wertham tells us that these concepts of “life devoid of value” and “life not worth living” were not Nazi inventions; they came from a book published in Leipzig in 1920 when Hitler was just embarking on his career. The book was entitled The Release of the Destruction of Life Devoid of Value. It was written by two intellectuals, jurist Karl Binding and psychiatrist Alfred Hoche. These men stressed economic concern – the cost of keeping patients alive and caring for them, Dr. Wertham says the book influenced, or crystallized, the thinking of a whole generation.
Charles Carroll, who was a student at the University of Berlin in 1937 and 1938, a civilian with the United States Military Government at the war’s end, and a member of General Clay’s staff at the Nuremberg medical atrocity trials, read Dr. Wertham’s book A Sign For Cain. He also made himself familiar with the Binding-Hoche Book The Release of the Destruction of Life Devoid of Value. Carroll (now an Episcopal priest) wrote an article which was published in Child and Family in 1973. In it he states that in the Binding-Hoche book the reader will find “almost without exception every argument in support of euthanasia that is being advanced at the present time.” He notes that when Joseph Fletcher (in his book Morals and Medicine) asserted that “the case of medical euthanasia depends upon the righteousness of suicide,” he accepted the primary tenet of Karl Binding. When Glanville Williams began his discussion of euthanasia with suicide and when asked if the right to take life should be limited to suicide, he echoed Karl Binding. Binding used the “right to death” concept. When Williams moved from the “right to death” by suicide to the “right to death” by euthanasia, he followed in Binding’s footsteps. When he insisted that the “right to death” be delegated to others’ family or doctors – he again followed in Binding’s footsteps.
Carroll went on to document the exact wording of countless passages and concepts from the Binding-Hoche book which were used by Joseph Fletcher and other promoters of euthanasia. Carroll also notes that the words (life) not worthy to be lived appeared time and time again in the transcript of the Nuremberg trials. These were the words of Binding and Hoche.
Father Carroll concludes; “While the parallels may have been coincidental and while the authors may have had the best intentions and the arguments they advanced may have had only the most compassionate ends in mind, I had to ask: What were the consequences of the proposals made by Binding and Hoche?”
But the trail comes ever closer to us.
On June 4, 1977, Mr. Robert A. Derzon of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) of the United States Government, prepared a memorandum for HEW Secretary Joseph A. Califano, Jr., to be presented in turn to President Carter. This memorandum (available from the U.S. Coalition for Life) presented possible initiatives in the health area which would produce both federal and system-wide savings in health expenditures. One of the initiatives was to “encourage adoption of Living Wills.” The document states: “Encouraging States to pass such a law, or more strongly, withholding Federal funds without passage, would serve to heighten public awareness of the use of such resources and would also lower health spending when such wills are executed.” The memo goes on to explain: “The cost-savings from a nationwide push toward ‘Living Wills’ is likely to be enormous. Over one-fifth of Medicare expenditures are for persons in their last year of life. Thus in FY (fiscal year) 1978, $4.9 billion will be spent for such persons and if just one-quarter of these expenditures were avoided through adoption of ‘Living Wills’, the savings under Medicare alone would amount to $1.2 billion. Additional Federal savings would accrue to Medicaid and the VA and Defence Department health programs.”
The same document provides a cost analysis relating to the reduction of “unwanted births.” The resultant suggestion made was to “reverse the decision not to cover abortions under Medicaid and/or intensively counsel and provide birth control assistance.” The memo states: “Covering abortions under Medicaid would be more effective in preventing unwanted births and would have far greater savings, but also far greater implications. In addition to being contrary to the President’s current stand, it would incur the anger of the Catholic Church, the ‘Right to Life Groups’ etc.”
Canada, United States, and other countries of the Western World which have experienced a catastrophic drop in their birth rates following the post-war baby boom now face an unfavourable age balance in present and future demographic ratios. The reality of an ever-growing elderly population will present serious social and economic problems in the future. The young will necessarily be taxed at higher rates to provide social services for the elderly, or there will have to be a considerable shift in priorities as to where tax revenues will flow. When we realize that euthanasia is being proposed as an answer to social problems at the highest levels of government, there is reason to be concerned about the future of our society.
Perhaps we should ponder some further words concerning violence written by Dr. Wertham in A Sign for Cain. The Binding-Hoche book illustrates the proposition that violence does not usually come from the uncontrolled instincts of the undereducated, but frequently it is rationalized policy from above. “While the victims lost their freedom, the intellectuals lost their convictions.” Wertham said, “Violence is much more solidly and insidiously set in our social thinking than is generally believed.” He also reminded us that violence “can corrode the thinking of the innocent…practically all people can be incited to violence.” Evidently it is easy for a civilized society to revert to a state of brutality. According to Wertham, “It was the indifference of mankind that let it take place,” and “A strong economic lever promoted the mass violence as well.”
