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Pro-Life World View | September 6, 2024

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This week on the Pro-Life World View, we bring you interesting articles discussing the eugenic link to euthanasia and assisted suicide and the manipulation of language by a society representing Radiologists.

Euthanasia’s Past and Present Connection to Eugenics
Alex Schadenburg – Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

History and current events show that euthanasia is not all about individual freedom and
autonomy 

“Wittingly or unwittingly, euthanasia advocates perpetuate the idea that human lives are unequal in value”, writes Alex Schadenburg in his review of Unnatural Death: Medicine’s Descent from Healing to Killing, a newly published book by US historian Professor Richard Weikart. Schadenburg quotes shocking extracts from Professor Weikart’s text, which demonstrate all too clearly the close connections between the promotion of euthanasia, from the 19th century to modern times, and the thinking of the eugenics movement: that certain human lives are worthless and that it is right for society to allow the killing of such people.

This thinking links together the leading Darwinian biologist Ernst Haeckel (1870); nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche who said “The great majority of men have no right to existence, but are a misfortune to higher men”; British philosopher F.H. Bradley, who wrote in the International Journal of Ethics (1894) “I am disgusted at the inviolable sanctity of the noxious lunatic … it seems wrong to load the community with the burden of these lives”; psychiatry professor Alfred Hoche and the law professor Karl Binding whose book (1920) lies at the roots of the Nazis’ murder of 200,000 Germans with disabilities; Nobel-Prize-winning biologist, Alexis Carrel, who, in 1935, according to Time magazine “declared that sentimental prejudice should not obstruct the quiet and painless disposition of incurables, criminals, hopeless lunatics”; and euthanasia legislation in Canada where people with disabilities or medical problems have been urged by medical professionals or social workers to get euthanasia.

Meanwhile, in New Zealand, Family Life International is urging its supporters to respond to the online public consultation End of Life Choice Act Review, which closes on 26 September 2024. Michelle Kaufman, Family Life International’s National Director, commented: “The take-home message from Alex Schadenburg’s excellent article is that euthanasia and assisted suicide are not all about individual freedom and autonomy.” 

Scholars panel tells radiologists: Don’t call first-trimester babies ‘living’
Micaiah Bilger – The College Fix

Radiologists must not refer to
first-trimester babies as “living” or “live”

The Society of Radiologists in Ultrasound has issued guidelines instructing radiologists and students to avoid referring first-trimester babies (pre-born children in the first twelve weeks) as “living” or “live” in a lexicon published on 27th August 2024.

They have issued the guidelines on the grounds that “these terms may be appropriated by people outside of the field of medicine to support political rhetoric and proscriptive legislation.”

Professor Charles Camosy at the Creighton School of Medicine, a private Catholic university, asked on X if he should “laugh or cry”, adding: “… here they explicitly say the reason to avoid the terms ‘live’ and ‘living’ is because it may have consequences they don’t like… not because it isn’t true.”

FLI’s National Director, Michelle Kaufman, commented: “By three to four weeks, the baby has a beating heart, and between five to six weeks, although a pregnant woman does not feel movement for another eight to ten weeks, the embryo begins to move. They cannot change the scientific facts, however hard they try.”

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