Marquette | The wholesale destruction of Jews and other ethnic minorities in Europe by Nazi Germany before and during World War II has been widely and justly condemned as a crime against humanity. Literally thousand of books and articles have been written on this particular genocide, highlighted by extensive testimony presented to the Nuremberg criminal trials after the war.
We have been conditioned since World War II to believe that such a horrible human tragedy cannot, or at least should not, happen again. Particularly in the Western World, schooled in the Judeo- Christian ethic, we believe that another Holocaust could not happen and particularly not in the United States. It cannot happen here, we saybecause we live under democratic forms of government and our U.S. Constitution guarantees us protection of our lives as a God-given right.
Until this current century, we were no doubt justified in relying on these guarantees to our human existence. But will these guarantees survive the very dangerous new trends in the Western world's regard for the protection of life? Is a new and different kind of Holocaust in the offing, not against Jews or other minorities, but a Holocaust against the elderly, the chronically ill, the terminally ill and the disabled, right here in our own country? This proposition might appear preposterous at first glance, but the issue is important enough to merit a closer look.
It is a surprising historical fact that in the United States, we are wittingly or unwittingly following the same steps that led Germany to the disastrous conclusion that some lives are "life not worthy of life" and can be legally extinguished to suit the needs of society and the desires of the family and the state. Germany progressed from the adoption of genetics theories in the last century to sterilization to abortion to euthanasia to the indiscriminate murder of ethnically and politically undesirable races and aliens. Except for timing, the United States is proceeding along the identical path, with only the legalization of euthanasia. or assisted suicide, remaining before the flood gates open. Indeed, we are now facing this last and fatal step on the "slippery slope".
In January 1997, the U.S. Supreme Court began to hear, on appeal, oral arguments for Vasco v. Quill and Washington v. Glucksberg, the New York and Washington cases which struck down anti-assisted suicide laws in each state earlier in 1996.
If the U.S. Supreme Court follows the unfortunate precedent which it established in its 1973 Roe v. Wade decision in which it created with very questionable constitutional basis a new "right" to abortion, then they may now create another new "right" to assisted suicide. If this happens, we will have taken the final step toward undermining the very foundation of our American democracy in which the government has the constitutional responsibility both to protect the lives of its citizens and not destroy those lives.
Ideas do have consequences and the legalization of assisted suicide would have momentous implications for the future of American society, families, medicine and the ultimate evaluation of the worth of a human life, as well as the very foundations of our American form ogovernment. Ultimately, the lives of our citizens may well be subordinated to the desires and interests of the government, which will decide directly or indirectly who will live and who will die. In fact, some U.S. authorities already are beginning to talk about the future demands on the resources of Medicare and Medicaid to maintain patients who might be kept alive for many years by modem medical technology, at great public expense, unless they can be dispensed with through assisted suicide.
It is well known that in the Netherlands today, where assisted suicide is widely practiced, serious abuses are being perpetrated against people who have not given their consent. In almost one-half of the assisted suicide cases in the Netherlands, the decision is being made by third parties without consulting the patient or the family. If the state or its agents can kill targeted people at will, then democracy as we know it will have perished. The next Holocaust, if and when it comes, will thus not be of the same character as the Nazis'. But the end result will be the same, namely, the wholesale killing of undesirables whether they be unborn, partially born, old, ill, or just tired of living.
Let us review the historical steps that both Germany and the United States have passed through since Darwin's theory of evolution originated in the middle 1850s and jolted the scientific world, including scholars, philosophers and even some misguided theologians. We will see how the seeds of the Holocaust in Nazi Germany preceded the Hitler era by several generations
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