Euthanasia: Difference between revisions

* We put down mad [[dogs]]; we kill the wild, untamed ox; we use the knife on sick [[sheep]] to stop their infecting the flock; we destroy abnormal offspring at birth; [[children]], too, if they are born weak or deformed, we drown. '''Yet this is not the work of [[anger]], but of reason – to separate the sound from the worthless.'''

* Death is a [[punishment]] to some, to others a [[Gifts|gift]], and to many a [[Favors|favor]].

* I believe often that death is good medical treatment because it can achieve what all the medical advances and [[technology]] cannot achieve today, and that is stop the suffering of the patient.

* A perfect world: Forbid voluntary euthanasia to people in the final stage of incurable illness because life is sacred and untouchable, but touch and desecrate the life of thousands and millions of healthy, capable people by sending them to [[war]], where they will be killed or maimed, to then subject the on purpose produced disabled to the prohibition of applying voluntary euthanasia.

* It would replace love with [[law]], zapping the private and familial [[goodwill]] that has normally attended such end-of-life matters and replacing them with the death sanction of the [[state]]. This would be bad for the [[Individuality|individual]] who wants to die, [[Bureaucracy|bureaucratizing]] his final moments of life, and it would be bad for those who want to live, too, since it would add up to the state saying: ‘Some lives are worth less than others and thus may legitimately be extinguished.’

* Sheila Aitkenhead is 38, has four children, and is consumed by various cancers. She is unbelievably pretty and healthy and sensible. When would she like to kill herself? "The point at which I simply represent [[Suffering|distress]]." Her [[children]] had been told.<br />I wanted dreadfully, interferingly to know what they thought about it. But we weren't told: oddly, it is all supposed to be so open.

*'''This may be the most important book written in the [[20th century|Twentieth Century]]'''.<br />This book and the arguments it contains were blamed by the prosecution in the [[World War II]] War Crimes Trials for the deterioration in [[ethics]] which resulted in the [[Nazism|Nazi]] killing program. This is the book that converted Dr. [[Karl Brandt]] from a man who wanted to join the great [[Missionaries|missionary]] doctor, [[Albert Schweitzer]], in [[Africa]], into the man who was the head of the [[w:T4_program|Nazi killing program]]. This is the book which the defendants blamed (trail transcript, trials of [[War crimes|war criminals]] before the ''Nuremberg Military Tribunal under Control Council Law No. 10'', the medical case, trial transcript page 7633) for their action in killing innocent human being in unprecedented ways and quantities. '''What started with this book stopped after millions of human beings were killed or tortured and men with unusual tattoos were executed so their tattooed skin could be used for lamp shades'''.<br>But some say it did not end in 1945 in [[Germany]], because the same and similar arguments published in this book in 1920 are being widely disseminated today for the same reasons they were published in this book in 1920. Let us hope that the result today is not similar. - From the ''Introduction'', p. 4.

*Granting '''death with dignity''' is not dependent on the consent of the tortured sick person. Of course death with [[dignity]] should never be granted against his known [[wishes]], but very often, persons who are momentarily [[unconscious]] have to be submitted to this healing intervention. - p. 13.

*There is no point of view, not [[legal]], [[social]], [[Morality|moral]] nor [[Religion|religious]] which presents a good reason for failure to legalize the euthanasia of those persons desperately desiring '''death with dignity''' by those who are apt to do so. - p. 20.

*Very often the relatives will belong to the class of persons permitted to give or request euthanasia, but not necessarily always. '''[[Hatred|Hate]] can put on the mask of [[pity]], and [[w:Cain and Abel|Cain murdered his brother Abel]]'''. - p. 23.

*The way to solve these problems has been the measure and degree of the humanity of this period of time. A long and painful development over the centuries has been retarded partly because of the [[Christianity|Christian]] way of thinking which has brought us to our present level of thinking. - p. 37.

*In 'Doctors of Infamy' pages 116, 117, the sworn statement by the chief nurse of the Hadamar Institution from the transcript of the War-Crimes Trials is quoted and '''indicates the execution of young idiots was extended to healthy young half-Jews'''. The text goes on to state: 'The granting of dying and in the case of incurable mental patients and malformed or idiot children may be considered to be still within the legitimate sphere of medical discussion. But as the winnowing process continued, it moved more and more openly to purely political and idiological criteria for death, whether the subjects were considered to be of 'undesirable racial groups' or whether they had merely become incapable of supporting themselves. '''The camouflage around these murderous intentions is revealed especially by proof that in all the concentration camps prisoners were selected by the same medical consultants who were simultaneously sitting in judgement over the destiny of mental institution inmates'''.' The text goes on to quote a sworn statement by the defendant Waldermar Hoven, formerly camp physician at Buchenwald. 'In 1941 I learned that a so-called euthanasia program for the extermination of the feeble-minded and crippled in Germany had gone into effect. The camp commandant, [[w:Ilse_Koch|Koch]], at that time assembled all the SS officer in positions of authority in the camp and announced that he received secret orders from Himmler to the effect that all feeble-minded and crippled camp inmates were to be killed.' '''Dr. Hoven then went on to tell how the killing was extended from the feeble-minded to the Jews'''. - Comments by Robert Sassone, p. 77.