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

To: Charles Hughes who wrote (15102)	11/17/1998 7:47:00 PM
From: jbe	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 67261

More on misuse of word "euthanasia" Chaz, I am not so sure that "it was the opponents of assisted suicide and patient consent that started using the word euthanasia as a FUD tactic." I think one could argue that the use of the word "euthanasia" in order to blur the distinction between "assisted suicide" and the very different notion of "mercy killing" started much earlier. Last month, pezz and I got into a discussion about euthanasia. Let me quote a section from one of my posts, which should clarify my point (I've added several additional sentences in brackets): "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. [The author, Binding, was primarily concerned to push his pet project, euthanasia of the "feeble-minded" -- i.e., the "unworthy of life". So he linked it to a more acceptable idea, "assisted suicide" for cancer patients. In other words, he deliberately confused those who were, in his opinion, generally "unworthy of life" and those who were leading lives no longer worth living, in their own opinion.] ..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. Of course, I assume that the Binding approach was diametrically opposed to the one that would be followed by a contemporary opponent of "assisted suicide". The former seeks to justify "mercy killing:" by linking it to "assisted suicide", while the latter (probably) seeks to discredit "assisted suicide" by linking it to "mercy killing". jbe