The initial event that disabled Terri Schiavo didn’t end up
killing her. But in her obituary notice, what will the cause of
death read? Will it read: murder? It should. The heart attack that
disabled her didn’t doom her; a husband without a heart did.
Under judge-made law, euthanasia has become America’s most
astonishing form of premeditated murder, a cold-blooded crime in
which husbands can kill their wives and even turn them into
accomplices to it through the telepathy of “their wishes.” To
wonder if we’re on the slippery slope sounds like an obtuse moral
compliment at this point. The truth is we’re at the bottom of the
slope and have been for quite some time, standing dumbly as the
bodies of innocent humans pile up around us. As we sift through
them — puzzling over how they got so numerous — we’re reduced to
mumbling sophistries about compassion and consent.
This is the “humane holocaust” of which Malcolm Muggeridge
wrote, a culture that kills the weak, from deaf unborn children to
mute disabled women, and calls it mercy. Those responsible for this
humane holocaust look into the mirror and see Gandhi, but it is
Hitler who glances back. If someone had taken the passages of
Mein Kampf that speak of euthanizing “unfortunates” and
inserted them into the columns from newspapers and magazines
cheering Schiavo’s death, would anyone have known the
difference?
In the humane holocaust, murdering undesirable unborn babies at
the beginning of life, the elderly at the end of it, and the
disabled in between, forms the final solution in the quest for the
perfect, burden-free society. In the humane holocaust, one
generation’s crimes become another generation’s compassion.
Could a liberal humanism which sanctions a million-plus
abortions a year and presses for a widening culture of euthanasia
be Hitlerite? No, many in our society would scoff. But read the
words of Leo Alexander, a doctor who assisted the chief American
counsel at the Nuremberg Tribunal, about the beginnings of Nazi
society and he is describing our own:
Whatever proportion these crimes finally assumed, it
became evident to all who investigated them that they had started
from small beginnings. The beginnings at first were merely a subtle
shift in emphasis in the basic attitudes of the physicians. It
started with the acceptance of the attitude, basic in the
euthanasia movement, that there is such a thing as life not worthy
to be lived. This attitude in its early stages concerned itself
merely with the severely and chronically sick. Gradually, the
sphere of those to be included in this category was enlarged to
encompass the socially unproductive, the ideologically unwanted,
the racially unwanted, and finally all non-Germans. But it is
important to realize that the infinitely small wedged-in lever from
which the entire trend of mind received its impetus was the
attitude towards the non-rehabilitative sick.
Then as now, doctors, judges, and politicians threw the stone
that turned the slope into an avalanche. And that stone was the
utilitarian rejection of an inviolable right to life for the
innocent — a right to life that no innocent human can lose because
it is based not on their utility but their humanity, a humanity
which no chronic illness, disability, or weakness can
eradicate.
With Hitler the advocates of the humane holocaust say that the
value of a human being derives not from his humanity but from his
activity, and hence inactive humans possess no value worth
preserving. With Hitler the advocates of the humane holocaust
accord power to the strong but none to the weak: Michael Schiavo
could kill Terri Schiavo simply because he was stronger than her.
With Hitler the advocates of the humane holocaust conceal
mercilessness in the language of mercy.
Evil is always done under the appearance of goodness. But evil
renamed is still evil. And injustice to which our society has
manipulated the aged and disabled into consenting is still unjust.
If a man consents to slavery, does slavery cease to be wrong? If
patients don’t mind violations against the Hippocratic Oath, are
doctors free to flout it? The engineers of the humane holocaust
uses this lie of consent as moral absolution of evil, but if it
can’t collect the lie from its victims (as in the case of abortion
where no killed child gives consent) it keeps churning anyways.
Terri Schiavo is its latest victim. May she find in God the real
compassion the vile imposter gods among us denied her.
