Disabled Professor: Nazi Euthanasia Program No Different Than Push to Euthanize People Today – LifeNews.com

Recently the euthanasia lobby attacked Dr Harvey Schipper for comparing assisted dying to the Nazi T-4 euthanasia program. This would not have been a big deal other than that fact that Schipper had been appointed to chair a working group that was to examine Canadas euthanasia law and make recommendations concerning possible extensions to the law.

Catherine Frazee, who is an Officer of the Order of Canada and professor emerita at the Ryerson University School of Disability Studies wrote an article titled: Look into the dark corners of history that was published in the Victoria Times Colonist on June 15. Frazee wrote:

None of Schippers critics disputed the facts upon which his reference was made, nor should they. As historians have chronicled, the Nazi euthanasia program originated when a father in Leipzig petitioned to end the life of his disabled daughter and Adolf Hitler dispatched his personal physician, Karl Brandt, to authorize her death as an act of mercy.

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According to historian Hugh Gallagher, as the story of the little Leipzig girl became known in medical circles, other families sent similar appeals to the Fhrer. It fell to Brandt to make determinations on each of these requests and ultimately to authorize the killing of at least 70,000 people with disabilities pursuant to what the American Holocaust Museum describes as a medically administered program of mercy death.

Frazee then challenges the attack on Schipper:

Schippers recusal as working group chairman will no doubt be applauded by advocates who seek to broaden the availability of assisted death in Canada. Others, such as myself, who know Schipper to be a man of considerable wisdom and integrity, are saddened that the 43-member panel which includes expert advocates on both sides of this debate failed to seize the opportunity to rise above the clamour and reject any suggestion that politics, rather than evidence, would govern their work.

Had they spoken out together, and forcefully, in defence of their colleague, the outcome might have been different.

This is not the first time that a measured and accurate reference to the historical facts of the Nazi euthanasia program has been condemned as strident, distasteful or offensive. It should be the last.

Nothing about medically assisted death is ahistorical. As we review current law and practice, and consider potential expansion to the Criminal Code exemptions that permit Canadian doctors and nurse practitioners to end the lives of certain patients, surely we have the maturity to invite history into the conversation.

Frazee then outlines the reality that people with disabilities have historically faced:

Doctors, at times, have killed. This is fact. Often, when they have killed or harmed, they have not acted alone, but as agents of state authority.

With all of their immense skill and influence, doctors have played indispensable roles in residential schools and asylums in Canada, comfort stations in Southeast Asia, enhanced interrogation facilities at Guantnamo Bay and extermination centres in Nazi Germany.

People with disabilities have suffered violence and harm at the hands of doctors, parents and caregivers. Sometimes, as with Satoshi Uematsu in Sagamihara, Japan, the world has instantly recoiled in horror. Sometimes, as with parent Robert Latimer in Saskatchewan, a court of law might ultimately uphold conviction, but not before public opinion solidifies in support of the perpetrator.

Sometimes, as with Brandt, a nation colludes.

The Nazi Aktion T4 euthanasia program is part of my history as a disabled person. Importantly, its also part of Schippers history as a physician. Those who would forbid us to speak of this history, or police our speech as strident and unwelcome, can only fuel doubt about whether its lessons have been learned.

Frazee concludes by challenging the working groups to examine the extension of euthanasia through the lens of history:

If our federal government is to benefit from the comprehensive reviews it assigned to the Council of Canadian Academies, and if the councils working groups are to gather the evidence Canadians require to guide policy decisions about providing medically assisted death to mature minors, to people with mental illness and to people no longer capable of expressing consent, then the history of euthanasia, and questions arising from the darkest corners of that history, must not be out of bounds.

As Margaret MacMillan, the distinguished Canadian historian, has said: We dont always know best, and the past can remind us of that.

Thank you to Catherine Frazee for setting the record straight.

LifeNews.com Note: Alex Schadenberg is the executive director of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition and you can read his blog here.

See the article here:

Disabled Professor: Nazi Euthanasia Program No Different Than Push to Euthanize People Today - LifeNews.com