“While everyone was asleep his enemy came and sowed weeds
all through the wheat, and then went off. When the crop grew and
bore fruit, the weeds appeared as well.” — Matthew
13:25-26
The culture of life landscape looks like the field in the
Parable of the Wheat and the Weeds. Changes on the Supreme Court
might produce an end to Roe v. Wade; Terri Schiavo’s
starvation death raises the Grim Reaper of passive euthanasia.
As Schiavo’s starvation is a given, and Court changes only a
possibility, the weeds appear to be taking over.
Commentators have wondered: Has the ghost of Dr. Walter Sackett
come back to haunt us? Dr. Sackett was a physician and a Florida
legislator; he is credited with offering in 1968 the nation’s first
death with dignity proposal.
In a March 10, 2005 editorial in the Arlington Catholic
Herald, Ken Concannon wrote about “The Right to Kill: From
Sackett to Schiavo.” As his editorial was written shortly before
Terri Schiavo died, Concannon concluded: “If Terri dies by court
order, George Felos, [Michael Schiavo’s attorney and] the ethical
heir of Walter Sackett, will have enormously advanced the cause of
euthanasia in this country.”
And so he has.
But a look back to 1973 — the year that the Supreme Court
handed down Roe v. Wade and also the year that protests
blasted a Sackett proposal — provides a brighter outlook.
Sackett’s legislation and his arguments for it could have
prevailed; we would be laboring in a poisoned, barren field.
IN 1973, SACKETT OFFERED HB 407, living will legislation. He had
been making related proposals for the past five years. Thomas
Horkan, executive director emeritus of the Florida Catholic
Conference, recalled the history of those years in correspondence
with me:
“The [Florida] Legislature [in 1968] took the old Constitution
and went through it from the beginning to the end, revising it as
they went. Early on, the Basic Rights section of the Constitution
came up including the phraseology, ‘the right to life, liberty,
etc.’ Sackett later said that in reading it over he was inspired to
offer an amendment to that provision, inserting the words ‘death
with dignity’ after the word ‘life’ in the constitution. That was
quickly voted down. A new constitution was eventually proposed and
adopted in the general election of 1968.”
Horkan added that Sackett told that story a number of times.
In 1969, Horkan recalled, “two things happened. I was employed
by the Florida bishops to come to Tallahassee and start up the
Florida Catholic Conference, representing the church in Florida.
The second was that Sackett filed his first ‘Death with Dignity’
bill in the Florida Legislature.”
HB 3184, prefiled in October 1969, provided that a patient could
claim a “right to death with dignity” and direct “that his life
shall not be prolonged beyond the point of a meaningful existence.”
If the patient was incompetent, next-of-kin could direct that
treatment be withdrawn. If the person was disabled and without
kinship as provided in the bill, three physicians could determine
that the prolongation of life was meaningless; a circuit judge had
to approve their determination.
In the early 1970s, wrote Horkan, “Sackett did several things
for political purposes. First he reduced the provisions in his bill
to limit its provisions to the right of a patient to direct in
writing the withdrawal of life-prolonging procedures.”
That description fits the text of HB 407, Sackett’s 1973 living
will bill, as provided by the State Library of Florida.
But the 1973 bill’s Legislative Summary retained the earlier
“death with dignity” language and affirmed that HB 407 “permits any
person to execute a document directing that his life shall not be
meaninglessly prolonged.”
THE SECOND ACTION SACKETT took, wrote Horkan, is that he “announced
publicly that his bill would permit doctors at the two Sunland
hospitals for the profoundly retarded in Florida — one in
Tallahassee and one in Orlando — to withdraw or withhold
medications and treatments, including antibiotics, from patients,
thereby saving the taxpayers of Florida $5 million per year.
“He said to private groups several times that this was the only
way that he could get other legislators to take an interest in his
bill because so many of them were only interested in financial and
money matters.”
On August 7, 1972 — according to the March 7, 1974 Senate
testimony of four U.S. cardinals — Dr. Sackett testified “before a
U.S. Senate Committee on the topic of death with dignity. At that
time Dr. Sackett approvingly quoted a statement made to him by a
medical director of a Florida hospital for the care of the severely
mentally retarded, to the effect that 90% of the 1,500 mentally
retarded now in two Florida hospitals should be allowed to die. Dr.
Sackett invoked the cost-benefit model. The money now used to care
for these severely retarded individuals could be more usefully
diverted to other causes.”
So, even before Roe v. Wade, Sackett was taking
pro-death proposals to a federal audience.
In any event, his propagandizing for passive euthanasia in
Florida, wrote Horkan, “energized two organizations of parents of
Sunland patients to become politically active, resulting in the
establishment of the Florida Association of Retarded Children (now
Florida Association of Retarded Citizens) to lobby against the
Sackett bill.”
In 1973, Sackett got a response on the national level as well.
The National Association for Retarded Citizens on November 2
adopted a resolution opposing House Bill 407 of the Florida
Legislature.
After summarizing the bill and Sackett’s comments on financial
benefits, the resolution declared that “it is a basic
Constitutional principle that all citizens including mentally
retarded persons are entitled to equal rights and equal protection
of their rights including the right to preservation of life.”
Furthermore, “a diagnosis or prognosis of mental retardation in
and of itself should never justify the withholding of treatment or
care, or the termination of such person’s life by withholding
medical treatment or procedures.”
NARC also resolved to attack any such legislation wherever it
was proposed.
HB 407, like Sackett’s other anti-life proposals, never became
law.
BUT WHAT IF IT HAD, and passive euthanasia of the severely mentally
handicapped had become legal?
What if, lacking opposition from the right to life movement and
its allies, passive euthanasia had been legalized throughout the
country? Some of the soil for that was right.
Immediately after Roe v. Wade, Sackett said that his
mail was coming in ten to one in favor of his HB 407 (AP report
cited in the Wanderer, April 12, 1973). While some
families saw a mentally handicapped child as a blessing, others did
not. One mother reportedly referred to her Down syndrome child as
an “uncomprehending vegetable” and said “I would elect to have
Elaine die, if I could.”
Also, an article in the October 25, 1973 New England Journal
of Medicine indicated that 14% of recent deaths in a Yale-New
Haven special care nursery were due to withholding treatment.
In this cultural context, what if the logic of Sackett’s
proposals had been carried forward? We would have not only passive
euthanasia of the mentally handicapped, but also active euthanasia.
It’s a commonplace that the one will follow from the other, as
providers will want to end the patient’s suffering as expeditiously
as possible.
Abortion and euthanasia of the helpless involve coercion
already; coercion would have become part of policy. Objectors might
have been forced to choose between prison and conscience. A normal
life could have become a moral impossibility.
Coercion was budding in 1973: For example, a community agency
arranged the nonconsensual sterilization of the Relf girls. Also, a
bill in the Oregon legislature called for forcing all hospitals to
perform abortions and sterilizations.
As the example of Nazi Germany shows, the pool of perceived
undesirables will inevitably widen. Had Sackett prevailed, anyone
remotely imperfect or needing assistance might now be at risk in
the United States.
HORKAN OFFERED SOME personal reflections on Walter Sackett: “I had
occasion to have various dealings with Dr. Sackett, who was
actually a good doctor. I later told him that he was a good doctor
but a terrible legislator.
“He used to deliver a woman’s ninth child free of charge, and
handled a large number of adoptions of the children of unwed
mothers who were referred to him by doctors from all around the
state of Florida. He had been involved in the Florida Medical
Association for some time. He used to arrange for housing for the
unwed mothers during latter stages of their pregnancies, deliver
their babies, and arrange placements privately with families. As an
attorney, I handled a number of adoptions for his patients and we
got along very well.”
Good and evil — wheat and weeds — grew side by side within
Walter Sackett, as they do within a society. The weeds appeared to
overtake him, as his proposals grew more heinous over time. Weeds
like the killing of Terri Schiavo thrive, but by now they could
have crushed the wheat. We can always anticipate harvest time.
