Independent TD Mattie McGrath spoke recently about his Private Members’ Bill entitled The Disability (Amendment) Act 2014 during a press conference organised by the advocacy group Every Life Counts. Deputy McGrath seeks to regulate against the continued use of the phrase “incompatible with life.” Another key word in his statement was “dehumanising.” Indeed.
This brought me back (again) to that never-ending conveyor belt of stark moral warnings: Belgium and the Netherlands.
Specialists in the Netherlands are well on their way to setting out national guidelines for the transplantation of organs from euthanasia victims. (Why is it, whenever I read the opinions of a “medical ethicist,” they’re pretty much the most unethical opinions I’ve ever heard?) This bit, I love: the guidelines’ authors suggest that it will help people who choose euthanasia to give a “meaning” to their death.
That society is largely blind to the connection between the Brave New (Dutch and Belgian) World on one hand, and the eugenics movement of the 1930s, is an appalling indictment to modern education and the media.
Read about Hartheim Euthanasia Center, near Linz, Austria. An essential part of training at Hartheim – where Franz Stangl, a future commandant at Treblinka, was moulded – was linguistic manipulation. Terms like “mercy killing” and “therapeutic value of the patient” and “unproductive” and “disadvantaged” and “genetically ill” and “no quality of life” rose to prominence there, as the slaughter of the disabled and unwanted children . Indeed, as the famous Catholic apologist, G.K. Chesterton once said, “Most Eugenists are Euphemists.”
And isn’t this reminiscent of comments made about children both with severe disabilities or adults with Motor Neuron Disease or older adults with dementia? I was deeply, deeply saddened to hear the great South African scrum-half, Joost van der Westhuizen, has Motor Neurone Disease. Confined to a wheelchair, he needs an interpreter for interviews, so affected is his speech. In Belgium and the Netherlands, he would be a candidate for euthanasia because a person does not have to be terminally ill to avail of it.
The medical profession has been at the seat of some of the greatest good known to man. Many of us would not be here today were it not for these brilliant professionals. But the medical profession is also responsible for presiding over the deaths of millions of unborn children and the deaths of a growing number of old or infirm or ‘merely’ depressed people.
So, while the Dutch are one of the most advanced people in the world, it is eerie that they are also so advanced in the new eugenics, or ‘neo-eugenics’. And, when your moral compass points towards a better use for the organs of the infirm, why wait? Given that rationing health services focus on the amount of time a patient gains per medical-dollar spent, is it not obvious who would gain greater “value” from said organs – the infirm or the otherwise healthy?
