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Politics : Bill Clinton Scandal - SANITY CHECK -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: pezz who wrote (10635)	10/23/1998 1:44:00 AM
From: jbe	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 67261

Re: Euthanasia (in the U.S. and Nazi Germany) Pez, you ask why I have reservations about euthanasia. Well, first I should say that I plan to write a living will, to make sure the plug gets pulled if I turn into a vegetable kept going by a life-support system. That is where I personally am concerned. My reservations about euthanasia stem, primarily, from its association with the eugenics movement, and later with Nazi extermination programs. Here's a quotation from a bone-chilling little book, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution. It deals with a polemical work, published in Germany in 1920 (13 years before the Nazi accession to power), entitled Authorization for the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life. ..Binding argued that suicide, which he termed 'a human right,' should not be unlawful. He also maintained that euthanasia, that is, assisted suicide, should not be penalized, referring to the desire for assisted suicide of many critically ill individuals dying a painful death. As an example, he pointed to terminal cancer patients who receive from their physicians a "deadly injection of morphine," and die,"without pain..." The discussion of suicide and terminal cancer patients was ancillary to Bindung's main concern. His polemic focussed on the fate of individuals considered "unworthy of life", which could mean both individuals whose lives were no longer worth living because of pain and incapacity and individuals who were considered so inferior that their lives could be labelled unworthy. He used the argument that the terminally ill deserved the right to a relatively painless death to justify the murder of those considered inferior. Eventually, as we know, the Nazis used "euthanasia" in order to rid the German gene pool of the mentally and physically handicapped, alcoholics, psychotics, drug addicts, etc. I don't think we are ready for that. :-)) More relevant and therefore more worrisome, I think, is the way assisted suicide "by choice" can be switched into "enforced" suicide, as shown in the passage I quoted. Whereas I doubt very much whether we would ever use euthanasia to get rid of "unworthy" people, there is the danger we could use it to get rid of "inconvenient" people. For example, I can remember reading a long article on this subject, some years ago. A number of physicians interviewed for the article expressed some grave concerns about euthanasia. Their argument went something like this: Look, Mrs. Jones is in the hospital. A hopeless case. She has a living will. Her friends and family are all there. They say, pull the plug. We pull the plug. In the next room there is Mrs. Smith. Same situation. She is a charity patient. She has no money. She has no relatives. The hospital certainly doesn't want to pay the bills, and the nursing home won't take her. So we pull the plug on her, too." So, I think it behooves us to be very, very careful. Euthanasia, potentially, can be used against people, to hasten their end when they really do not want to go. I have not been following the debate on euthanasia, so it may be that I have raised some very, ho-hum and obvious points that have been satisfactorily settled long ago. If so -- you did ask...:-) jbe