H
HagiaSophia
Guest
I was rather surprised to find this on the editorial page of the Telegraph:
"…And yet the moral depravity of the Nazis is not as distant as those horrific pictures of gas chambers and mountains of corpses suggest. Hitler’s holocaust began in the 1930s with a policy which was not merely popular in other countries, but frequently practised by them: the forced sterilisation of those deemed “unfit to reproduce” because they were thought to carry a genetic predisposition to mental or physical handicap.
Socialist intellectuals in Britain such as George Bernard Shaw were enthusiastic proponents of that policy. The US Supreme Court ruled that forced sterilisation was compatible with the Constitution in 1927, when Oliver Wendell Holmes confidently stated that it was “better for all the world if society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind”. Over the next decade, the United States forcibly sterilised more than 20,000 women – a number dwarfed by the Swedes, who only stopped forcibly sterilising women for carrying “defective genes” in the 1970s.
Forced sterilisation is not murder, of course. But the Nazis’ slide from the forced sterilisation of the mentally handicapped to their mass murder suggests how slippery the slope from the one to the other can be. As the BBC’s outstanding series on Auschwitz demonstrates, the Nazis decided that it was not worth feeding and nursing “gibbering idiots”, and that they could not “burden future generations with their care”. They claimed that the most “humane” alternative was to exterminate the people they called “useless eaters”. They experimented with gas as a discreet method of killing the mentally handicapped before they transferred that innovation to killing Jews.
By the summer of 1941, 70,000 disabled people had been killed by being invited into showers – which turned out to dispense not water but carbon monoxide. Three doctors would look at the medical records of a “patient”. They would mark the records with a red cross if they thought the individual was a suitable candidate for “evacuation”. A majority vote decided his or her fate. The advantages of gassing were that it was hidden from view: shooting people en masse had the effect of turning even SS men into depressed drunks.
There are disturbing parallels with our present laws on abortion. To abort an unborn child beyond 24 weeks’ gestation is recognised in British law as infanticide – but only if the child is thought to be “normal”. If doctors diagnose physical or mental handicap, including, it seems, a cleft palate, it is lawful to kill the unborn child at any time up to its birth. This is a programme for eliminating the handicapped. Its justification is that it is better “not to burden” either the present or future generations with their care. It differs in practice from the mass murder in Nazi Germany – but it is not easy to articulate how it differs at the level of moral principle. The state is killing unborn children because we do not want to live with them, or to bear the costs of looking after them. It is a justification the Nazis would have appreciated.
About 200,000 unborn children are aborted every year in England and Wales, many because doctors have decided they will be handicapped. That is a killing rate of nearly 550 a day: less than the number of people gassed daily at Auschwitz, but a horrifically large number none the less – and larger than the numbers of defenceless handicapped murdered by the Nazis.
Abortion Kills
We have successfully disguised the enormity of what we are doing from ourselves, just as the Nazis did. Next Thursday should not be an occasion for congratulating ourselves on how far we have come from the moral abyss of National Socialism. It should rather prompt an honest recognition of how disturbingly close our abortion laws have taken us to it.
telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2005/01/23/dl2301.xml&sSheet=/portal/2005/01/23/ixportal.html
"…And yet the moral depravity of the Nazis is not as distant as those horrific pictures of gas chambers and mountains of corpses suggest. Hitler’s holocaust began in the 1930s with a policy which was not merely popular in other countries, but frequently practised by them: the forced sterilisation of those deemed “unfit to reproduce” because they were thought to carry a genetic predisposition to mental or physical handicap.
Socialist intellectuals in Britain such as George Bernard Shaw were enthusiastic proponents of that policy. The US Supreme Court ruled that forced sterilisation was compatible with the Constitution in 1927, when Oliver Wendell Holmes confidently stated that it was “better for all the world if society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind”. Over the next decade, the United States forcibly sterilised more than 20,000 women – a number dwarfed by the Swedes, who only stopped forcibly sterilising women for carrying “defective genes” in the 1970s.
Forced sterilisation is not murder, of course. But the Nazis’ slide from the forced sterilisation of the mentally handicapped to their mass murder suggests how slippery the slope from the one to the other can be. As the BBC’s outstanding series on Auschwitz demonstrates, the Nazis decided that it was not worth feeding and nursing “gibbering idiots”, and that they could not “burden future generations with their care”. They claimed that the most “humane” alternative was to exterminate the people they called “useless eaters”. They experimented with gas as a discreet method of killing the mentally handicapped before they transferred that innovation to killing Jews.
By the summer of 1941, 70,000 disabled people had been killed by being invited into showers – which turned out to dispense not water but carbon monoxide. Three doctors would look at the medical records of a “patient”. They would mark the records with a red cross if they thought the individual was a suitable candidate for “evacuation”. A majority vote decided his or her fate. The advantages of gassing were that it was hidden from view: shooting people en masse had the effect of turning even SS men into depressed drunks.
There are disturbing parallels with our present laws on abortion. To abort an unborn child beyond 24 weeks’ gestation is recognised in British law as infanticide – but only if the child is thought to be “normal”. If doctors diagnose physical or mental handicap, including, it seems, a cleft palate, it is lawful to kill the unborn child at any time up to its birth. This is a programme for eliminating the handicapped. Its justification is that it is better “not to burden” either the present or future generations with their care. It differs in practice from the mass murder in Nazi Germany – but it is not easy to articulate how it differs at the level of moral principle. The state is killing unborn children because we do not want to live with them, or to bear the costs of looking after them. It is a justification the Nazis would have appreciated.
About 200,000 unborn children are aborted every year in England and Wales, many because doctors have decided they will be handicapped. That is a killing rate of nearly 550 a day: less than the number of people gassed daily at Auschwitz, but a horrifically large number none the less – and larger than the numbers of defenceless handicapped murdered by the Nazis.
Abortion Kills
We have successfully disguised the enormity of what we are doing from ourselves, just as the Nazis did. Next Thursday should not be an occasion for congratulating ourselves on how far we have come from the moral abyss of National Socialism. It should rather prompt an honest recognition of how disturbingly close our abortion laws have taken us to it.
telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2005/01/23/dl2301.xml&sSheet=/portal/2005/01/23/ixportal.html