The Slippery Slope from Life to Death
Once government begins to define life and humanity, there is no end to the possibilities for subjective and selective determination as to who will be allowed to live.
At one time, blacks were not recognized as human beings. This was the rationale behind the slave trade that brought black Africans to the United States. They were transported in slave ships that held them confined in the same manner that livestock is confined when shipped to the slaughter houses. Once in America, there were auctioned like cattle to the highest bidder.
In Nazi Germany, only the Aryan race was considered human, and we know the consequences of that thinking. The treatment of Jews and other non-Aryans was similar to that of animals. And the Nazi genetic experiments remain a source for horror stories even today.
Since the early 1900’s, Margaret Sanger (founder of Planned Parenthood Federation of America), has convinced a sizeable population that unborn babies are less than human, and the expected eugenicist result has transpired. “The most merciful thing that a large family does to one of its infant members is the kill it.” (Margaret Sanger, Women and the New Race [Eugenics Publ. Co., 1920, 1923]) Since Roe v. Wade in 1973, more than 56 million babies have been killed in their mother’s womb.
BREAKING… June 24, 2022:
The Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade in a 6:3 vote.
The court’s ruling does not make abortion illegal, but with access to the procedure no longer deemed a constitutional right, states can now move to ban it. About half of them have already indicated a willingness to do so.
Who’s Next?
Will a society which has assumed the right to kill infants in the womb – because they are unwanted, imperfect, or merely inconvenient – have difficulty in assuming the right to kill other human beings, especially older adults who are judged unwanted, deemed imperfect physically or mentally, or considered a possible social nuisance?
In the 2020 Covid-10 coronavirus, reports from Italy exposed a disturbing choice people may be forced to make. Numerous reports speak of Italian medical facilities being overwhelmed and doctors are not able to care for everyone who seeks treatment. There is also a critical shortage of ventilators needed to help those in the greatest danger.
The published guidelines of the Italian College of Anesthesia, Analgesia, Resuscitation and Intensive Care for nurses and doctors to follow says, “Allocation is a very complex and delicate choice. […] The foreseeable increase in mortality for clinical conditions not linked to the current epidemic due to the reduction of chirurgical activity and the scarcity of resources needs to be taken into consideration. It may become necessary to establish an age limit for access to intensive care.
The next candidates for arbitrary reclassification as non-persons are the elderly. This will become increasingly so as the proportion of the old and weak in relation to the young and strong becomes abnormally large, due to the growing anti-family sentiment, the abortion rate, and medicine’s contribution to the lengthening of the normal life span. The imbalance will cause many of the young to perceive the old as a cramping nuisance in the hedonistic lifestyle they claim as their right. As the demand for affluence continues and the economic crunch gets greater, the amount of compassion that the legislature and the courts will have for the old does not seem likely to be significant considering the precedent of the non-protection given to the unborn and newborn. [Francis Schaeffer, Whatever Happened to the Human Race?]
Euthanasia
We have now entered the age of “mercy killing.”
Physician-assisted suicide is legal in some countries, under certain circumstances, including Austria, Belgium, Canada, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain, Switzerland, parts of the United States and parts of Australia. Eleven states (Colorado, Hawaii, California, Oregon, Washington, Vermont, Maine, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, and the District of Columbia) now have legalized assisted suicide, and other states are considering the same.
Canada allows the poor to kill themselves if they are too poor to continue living with dignity. In fact, the ever-generous Canadian state will even pay for their deaths. The Canadian parliament enacted Bill C-7, a sweeping euthanasia law which repealed the ‘reasonably foreseeable’ requirement – and the requirement that the condition should be ‘terminal’. Now, as long as someone is suffering from an illness or disability which ‘cannot be relieved under conditions that you consider acceptable’, they can take advantage of what is now known euphemistically as ‘medical assistance in dying’ (MAID for short) for free.
Their goal is to get rid of people who are a burden to society.
Joseph Fletcher, the popularizer of “situational ethics,” in his 1973 discussion of death with dignity gives this argument for euthanasia:
It is ridiculous to give ethical approval to the positive ending of sub-human life in utero as we do in therapeutic abortions for reasons of mercy and compassion but refuse to approve of positively ending a sub-human life in extremis. If we are morally obliged to put an end to a pregnancy when an amniocentesis reveals a terrible defective fetus, we are equally obliged to put an end to a patient’s hopeless misery when a brain scan reveals that a patient with cancer has advanced brain metastases. [Joseph Fletcher, “Ethics and Euthanasia,” American Journal of Nursing, 1973.]
One is reminded of the slave holders who devoutly espoused the theory that slavery was really for the good of the black man and that in the end he would be thankful for the opportunity to share in the white man’s culture, even from the distance of the garden shed. The Nazis also argued that their victims were being sacrificed for the high end of the general good of society.
Many well-meaning people are attracted to what might seem to be the beneficial aspects of some sort of euthanasia program, because they think they can be free of the guilt of responsibility.
The “right-to-die” movement is not calling for a right to die, they’re mostly talking about a right to kill. The advocates of euthanasia are asking the government and courts to step aside and allow people who are feeble and elderly to be snuffed out.
Consider the people who were “assisted” in ending their lives by Dr. Jack Kevorkian. He wasn’t killing terminally ill patients – they had Alzheimer’s and were in a lot of pain, but they were alive and walking around. Dr. Kevorkian portrays another basic belief of humanist ideology – the extermination of the old, useless, and the infirm. Kervorkian believes that he has the right to help people out of their pain if they want to die. He claims to render “a medical service,” and his lawyer is clear that “he’s not going to stop … doing the right thing.”
Language is an important tool in convincing others of your position.
Euthanasia advocates have been skillful in masking their true intent with slogans like “death with dignity” and “a right to die.” These phrases easily capture people’s attention. Everyone believes in a death with dignity.
Though I’m sure the medical community is well-intentioned, it is still a fact that their idea of mercy is increasingly to dehumanize their patients, to disguise the helpless person so that not even their family recognizes them. In time, the family’s love turns to pity, which turns to horror until, to our warped hearts, murder becomes mercy.
But these slogans take on new meaning when they are interpreted by our courts. The right to die may sound wonderful – until we realize that legally it means that you can kill yourself or someone can kill you, even if you don’t want to die.
Language is powerful. But when it is interpreted by the courts it becomes much more than mere slogans. It becomes the law of the land, and often that interpretation is not at all what we expected.
- Daily, senior citizens and accident victims are starved to death because their families have been convinced that even food and water are extraordinary means to preserve their life.
- Over one-fifth of Medicare expenses are for persons in their last year of life. Thus in fiscal year 1978, $4.9 billion dollars was spent for such persons and if just one-quarter of those expenditures were avoided through adoption of living wills, the savings under Medicare alone would amount to $1.2 billion. [ WASHINGTON POST, June 22, 1977]
- The drug company, Hoescht AG, has been granted the first patent for a euthanasia drug developed by Michigan State University. The drug is intended for use on animals but the patent is worded to include humans. (Source: UPI)
Critics of the U.S. Supreme Court’ Roe v. Wade decision have long claimed that legalized abortion would lead to legalized euthanasia. Supporters of Roe have often scoffed at the idea, insisting that decisions to eliminate a human fetus in no way devalue the lives of born persons. Yet recent court cases in Michigan and Washington have reversed the debate: Euthanasia supporters are openly citing Roe as precedent for a constitutional right to “rational” suicide. In the case of People v. Kevorkian, a trial judge has relied partly on Roe and the later abortion case, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, to find a consitutional right to assisted suicide. Jack Kevorkian’s attorney, Geoffrey Fieger argues that such a right is even better grounded than a right to abortion, because no unwilling ‘third party’ is involved.
Citing Planned Parenthood vs. Casey, on May 3, 1994, Washington U.S. District Court Judge Barbara Rothstein struck down the Washington state law that banned physician assisted suicide. Judge Rothstein stated that the terminally ill “have the same right to hasten death that they have to choose an abortion…” “Like the abortion decision, the decision of a terminally ill person to end his life involves the most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime,” the judge wrote in her decision.
Voters in Oregon rejected Measure 51 in 1997 which would have repealed doctor-assisted suicide. The vote and the legal interpretation mean a person who is mentally competent and diagnosed as having less than six months to live could request a lethal prescription from a doctor today, wait the required 15 days, then take the drugs. Dr. William Toffler, head of Physicians for Compassionate Care, a group of doctors favoring repeal, said the vote would put “the poor, the vulnerable, the weak and the aged” at risk. “It has profound complications for the whole world,” he said. “It’s a profound paradigm shift for the practice of medicine.”
Holland has euthanasia. They started out killing the terminally ill, but have veered markedly from this approach. Some estimate that over 50% of those euthanized in Holland are killed without consent. Some of the elderly are afraid to go to the doctor, for fear they will receive involuntary euthanasia. [ Dr. Tom Tolomeo, “Big Brother, M.D.,” All About Issues, July-August 1993]
Infanticide
When the United States Supreme Court made its Roe v. Wade ruling about abortion in 1973, Justice Harry Blackmun delivered the opinion of the Court. The first section in his opinion was titled “Ancient Attitudes.” In it he referred back to pre-Christian law. He said,
“Greek and Roman law afforded little protection to the unborn. If abortion was prosecuted in some places, it seems to have been based on a concept of a violation of the father’s right to his offspring. Ancient religion did not bar abortion.”
Thus, as his first point, Mr. Justice Blackmun based his opinion on the practice of pre-Christian Greek and Roman law. Most people who read this did not realize the logical result concerning babies after their birth. Roman law permitted not only abortion but also infanticide.
Now that this door is open, how long will it be before infanticide is socially accepted and perhaps legalized?
On June 14, 1981, the Hartford Courant ran an expose entitled “Defective Newborns Are Dying by Design” about infanticide at Yale-New Haven Hospital. The author, Diane Brozek, explained “In some of the cases… parents approached doctors about the possibility of overdose. Other times… doctors suggested the option, assuring parents they would sign the death certificate, no questions asked. The parents ended their infants’ lives with morphine or phenobarbital prescribed by the doctors and usually dissolved in a baby bottle.”
Changing attitudes toward infanticide
- On Jan. 30, 2019 Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia endorsed a bill that would have broadened the ability of women to obtain an abortion up to the point of birth. Northam defended the bill, adding that if a baby were born alive during such an abortion — he assumed that the abortion would be due to “severe deformities” or “a fetus that’s not viable” — then the baby could be “kept comfortable” while the family and the doctor decide its fate.
- Peter Singer, an endowed chair at Princeton’s Center for Human Values, said, “Killing a disabled infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. Very often it is not wrong at all.”
- In May 1973, James D. Watson, the Nobel Prize laureate who discovered the double helix of DNA, granted an interview to Prism magazine, then a publication of the American Medical Association. Time later reported the interview to the general public, quoting Watson as having said, “If a child were not declared alive until three days after birth, then all parents could be allowed the choice only a few are given under the present system. The doctor could allow the child to die if the parents so choose and save a lot of misery and suffering. I believe this view is the only rational, compassionate attitude to have.”
- In January 1978, Nobel laureate, Francis Crick, was quoted in the Pacific News Service as saying “… no newborn infant should be declared human until it has passed certain tests regarding its genetic endowment and that if it fails these tests it forfeits the right to live.”
- At a population-control conference in Washington D.C. one speaker saw “no reason why anyone who accepted abortion should balk at infanticide.” Another urged certain medical qualifying tests for all newborns. These would determine their genetic characteristics and, thus, whether their right to life should be forfeited. Of course, at present only a few hold these ideas, but unfortunately they are presenting these ideas again and again. Taken a little more seriously each time, they become just a little more thinkable each time.
- Forty-two percent of women studied in a medical study in France said that if they gave birth to a severely deformed baby, they would favor killing the child. Twenty percent said no, and the rest were undecided.
- Certain segments of the church are also not without a positive opinion on the subject of infanticide. A task force of the Anglican Church of Canada reached a conclusion in a 1977 report that it could be morally right to terminate the lives of newborn infants with severe brain damage. The callousness of the report is evident in its phraseology: “Our sense and emotions lead us to the grave mistake of treating human-looking shapes as if they were human, although they lack the least vestige of human behavior and intellect. In fact the only way to treat such defective infants humanely is not to treat them as human.” Happily, the general synod of the Anglican Church in Canada did not approve the report, but that such a report came forth from an official group of a major denomination in our day says much about the direction taken by certain segments of the church in regard to infanticide.
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How far have our Congressmen and Senators slid down that “slippery slope” of abortion toward infanticide?
Is it right to kill a fully delivered child? Consider the exchange between Sen. Rick Santorum (R., Pa.) and Senator Russ Feingold (D., Wis.) during the Senate debate on whether to override Clinton’s veto of the ban on Partial Birth Abortions.
Sen. Santorum: “If that baby were delivered breech style and everything was delivered except for the head, and for some reason that that baby’s head would slip out – that the baby was completely delivered – would it then still be up to the doctor and the mother to decide?”
Sen. Feingold: “The standard of saying it has to be a determination, by a doctor, of health of the mother, is a sufficient standard that would apply to that situation.”
Sen. Santorum: “That doesn’t answer the question. Let’s assume the head is accidentally delivered. Would you allow the doctor to kill the baby?”
Senator Feingold: “That is a question that should be answered by a doctor, and by the woman who received the advice from the doctor.”
We cannot underestimate the enormity of the battle before us. For over a decade pro-infanticide forces have been preparing us to accept legalized infanticide. Legalized abortion has made infanticide the next logical step in the devaluation and destruction of innocent lives. Technology such as amniocentesis and ultrasound has enabled us to diagnose a variety of handicaps in the womb. We can legally kill a handicapped child or any child up until the day it is born. But what is the difference between killing a child two days before it is born or two days after its birth? The pro-infanticide forces are also using the same methods now that the pro-abortion advocates used to see abortion legalized. That is, they now focus on the “hard cases” in a way that opens the door. Later, as has happened in abortion, these “hard cases” wil be forgotten as infanticide becomes normal practice.
The potential abuse of genetic knowledge, the ever-expanding power of the government, and arbitrary law, and, indeed, the prospects for the right of the individual and for humanness are grim. Dr. James R. Sorenson, associate professor of socio-medical sciences at Boston University Medical Center, spoke at the symposium “Prenatal Diagnosis and Its Impact on Society” and said:
[There is] a developing cultural or social attitude that … a couple ought to exercise control over their reproductive fate. While a couple should have as many children as they please (within cultural “limits”), increasingly our societal view is that they should not have unwanted children. I think that this developing societal attitude can very easily extend to encompass not just control of the number of children but … control of their quality as well. In short, I am suggesting that it may become culturally acceptable and perhaps even expected that parents ought to avoid the birth of a defective child, especially when we have a technology that can help avoid such events.
The matter does not stop with malformed babies, but leads naturally to limiting the number of babies a family may have. In 1971, at the national Conference on Population Education in Washington, D.C., Martha Willing, co-director of Population Dynamics of Seattle, Washington, first proposed tax disincentives for parents who have more than two children. Then the state should proceed “to penalize deliberate violations of a small family norm and set up controls which prevent such violations.” The author continues:
After the third child is born, both mother and father will have to present themselves at a hospital to undergo sterilization procedures. If the couple does not appear, there will be no birth certificate issued to the third child, but instead a “third child paper.” The mother can be tattooed or marked to signify a third birth to any subsequent doctor. Instead of the missing parent, the child can be sterilized on the spot, insuring that this undue share of the gene pool will not be carried forward.
Population Control
Today, the elitists are introducing the argument that population control is necessary to protect the environment. Their argument is there are too many people.
During a TED conference, Bill Gates told the audience that vaccines need to be used to reduce world population figures in order to solve global warming and lower CO2 emissions to almost zero.
Stating that the global population was heading towards 9 billion, Gates said, “If we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services (abortion), we could lower that by perhaps 10 or 15 per cent.”
Quite how an improvement in health care and vaccines that supposedly save lives would lead to a lowering in global population is an oxymoron, unless Gates is referring to vaccines that sterilize people, which is precisely the same method advocated in White House science advisor John P. Holdren’s 1977 textbook Ecoscience, which calls for a dictatorial “planetary regime” to enforce draconian measures of population reduction via all manner of oppressive techniques, including sterilization.
Gates’ eugenicist zeal is shared by his fellow Bilderberg elitists, many of whom have advocated draconian policies of population control in their own public speeches and writings. The Rockefellers want to eliminate about 85% of us. The Georgia Guidestones prescribe even fewer survivors. “Maintain[ing] humanity under 500 [million] in perpetual balance with nature.” Indeed, the Rockefeller family funded eugenics research in Germany through the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institutes in Berlin and Munich. The Rockefeller Foundation praised Hitler’s sterilization program in Nazi Germany.
As was reported by the London Times, a “secret billionaire club” meeting in early May 2009 took place in New York and was attended by David Rockefeller, Ted Turner, Bill Gates and others focused around “how their wealth could be used to slow the growth of the world’s population”. The central theme and purpose of the secret Good Club meeting of the plutocrats was the priority concern posed by Bill Gates, namely, how to advance more effectively their agenda of birth control and global population reduction. In the talks a consensus reportedly emerged that they would “back a strategy in which population growth would be tackled as a potentially disastrous environmental, social and industrial threat.”
We questioned establishment media spin which portrayed the attendees as kind-hearted and concerned philanthropists by pointing out that Ted Turner has publicly advocated shocking population reduction programs that would cull the human population by a staggering 95%. He has also called for a Communist-style one child policy to be mandated by governments in the west. In China, the one child policy is enforced by means of taxes on each subsequent child, allied to an intimidation program which includes secret police and “family planning” authorities kidnapping pregnant women from their homes and performing forced abortions.
In the third world, Turner has contributed literally billions to population reduction, namely through United Nations programs, leading the way for the likes of Bill & Melinda Gates and Warren Buffet (Gates’ father has long been a leading board member of Planned Parenthood and a top eugenicist).
The notion that these elitists merely want to slow population growth in order to improve health is a complete misnomer. Slowing the growth of the world’s population while also improving its health are two irreconcilable concepts to the elite. Stabilizing world population is a natural byproduct of higher living standards, as has been proven by the stabilization of the white population in the west. Elitists like David Rockefeller have no interest in “slowing the growth of world population” by natural methods, their agenda is firmly rooted in the pseudo-science of eugenics, which is all about “culling” the surplus population via draconian methods.
David Rockefeller’s legacy is not derived from a well-meaning “philanthropic” urge to improve health in third world countries, it is born out of a Malthusian drive to eliminate the poor and those deemed racially inferior, using the justification of social Darwinism.
As is documented in Alex Jones’ seminal film Endgame, Rockefeller’s father, John D. Rockefeller, exported eugenics to Germany from its origins in Britain by bankrolling the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute which later would form a central pillar in the Third Reich’s ideology of the Nazi super race. After the fall of the Nazis, top German eugenicists were protected by the allies as the victorious parties fought over who would enjoy their “expertise” in the post-war world.
Government Provided Rationed Health Care
Health care is a scarce resource, and all scarce resources are rationed in one way or another. Our countries leaders have shown a shortage of morals, an excess of debt and pending currency crisis. With government provided health care, as we have already seen with Obamacare, Medicare, Medicaid, and the VA, health care is rationed by long waits, high patient co-payment requirements, doctors withholding information about treatment options, low payments to doctors that discourage some from serving public patients, and limits on payments to hospitals.
We already kill preborn children; there is violence in virtually every city; drugs and weapons are in our schools; and what a few years ago was called pornography is piped into our homes 24 hours a day on television. The people raised with these norms will constitute the government running the health care system, in which every patient will be an expense. In our present system, every patient is a potential profit.
Consider the following scenarios:
- A 70-year old retired man needs cataract surgery. This is going to cost the bureaucracy $2,000 for some guy who wants to see, but doesn’t make any money. No surgery. (Medicare has already advocated allowing people to go virtually blind before we fix their cataracts.)
- A 60-year old grandmother who doesn’t generate any income needs dialysis because of kidney failure. That’s going to cost thousands. Forget it.
- A 50-year old man who makes $25,000 a year needs bypass surgery because of his chest pain. This guy may pay $3,000 a year in taxes; his surgery is going to cost $40,000. His ledger sheet doesn’t balance. No surgery.
- A baby is born with a handicap that’s going to require frequent doctor visits, physical therapy, and multiple medications. What a drain on the system. Deny the baby adequate health care and let him die.
When euthanasia becomes law it will start out on a strictly voluntary basis for the terminally ill. Then it will become available to anyone who wants it, and finally it will be involuntary, practiced on anyone who is a strain on the system: the elderly, the handicapped, the unemployable – potentially anyone who doesn’t benefit the system.
To quote C. Everett Koop,
“The moral question for us is not whether the suffering and dying are persons but whether we are the kind of persons who will care for them without doubting their worth.”
How we treat the sick and the unborn is not a measure of their humanity but of OUR OWN.
Additional Reading:
The Real Inconvenient Truth