In 1985 when Dr. Josep Mengele, the monster of Auchswitz, was thought to be still alive and hiding in South America, a hearing was held in Jerusalem to obtain evidence against him. The Boston Sunday Globe described the dramatic testimony: for three days, twins and dwarfs told a hushed audience how Mengele injected them with medicine, mutilated them, and in one piece of testimony brought the audience to tears, tried to starve a newborn baby to death to see how long babies could survive without food. The child's mother testified that she killed her own child after six days to spare the baby any more agony.
Our minds recoil from knowledge of such horror, but we must never ignore it. Above all we must never forget Dr. Mengele.
History books tell us that the Holocaust began in 1939, but that was only its official beginning. It dates from 1920 with the publication of a small book, THE RELEASE OF DISTRUCTION OF LIFE DEVOID OF VALUE, written by a physician and a lawyer, Drs. Binding and Hoche. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, they discovered that Binding and Hoche's "Culture of Death" was already in operation. Their book had been the rational for a program of forced sterilization, forced abortion, and the killing of the mentally and physically handicapped, the elderly and social misfits.
Those who did the killing were not soldiers or politicians. They were doctors, psychiatrists, lawyers and judges who searched and found thousand of lives "devoid of value." They were willingly "creating a race of thoroughbreds" and made no effort to keep it a secret.
Eventually, over three hundred thousand lives were "terminated" in hospitals and orphanages. Half were children. Later, the Nazis used these methods to "terminate" others whose lives were "devoid of value" - Jews, Poles, Gypsies. By 1945, seven million human lives were sacrificed.
In 1985, Dr. Mengele was indeed alive, still practicing his "profession" as an abortionist in Argentina. By then he may have known how long a baby can survive, because two years before the Jerusalem hearing, a court in Bloomington, Indiana, had ordered the local hospital not to perform a simple operation to allow a Downs Syndrome baby to eat. It took Baby Boy Doe ten days to die the dreadful death of dehydration and starvation.
In 1973, the same year our Supreme Court told the world that they didn't know whether or not an unborn baby is a person with "meaningful life," the NEW ENGLAND JOURNAL OF MEDICINE revealed that fourteen per-cent of infant deaths at Yale-New Haven Medical Center were related to the withholding of treatment (treatment often being food and water).
This fact was later confirmed when Senator Regina Smith, Chairman of the Connecticut Senate Health Committee, held hearings on proposals to conform State law to the Federal Child Abuse Treatment Act. During the hearings Doctors from Yale-New Haven testified to the widespread practice of allowing handicapped infants to die. They estimated that 45 babies had been killed "in the recent past".
Three years after Senator Smith's hearings, the CBS program 60 MINUTES, in a segment on spina bifida babies at Oklahoma Children's Hospital, reported that handicapped babies were allowed to live or condemned to die according to a "scientific formula" used in American hospitals nationwide.
The "scientific formula", published in 1983 in the journal PEDIATRICS is QL=NEx(H+S). "The quality of life equals the child's natural endowments plus the status of his home (read money) and society (read social position)." Ah! The wonders of science!
An ACLU spokesman explained that doctors decided "..to let the children die because of their subjective belief that the child .. may be better off dead than physically or mentally handicapped." (Nat'l RTL News 5/16/95)
In the past decade a number of proposals have been made to declare infants "legally non-persons" up to a specified period of time - six days, two weeks, six weeks, even a year. While such laws will probably have to wait their turn on the slippery slope until the elderly can be euthanized, we will continue to hear calls for laws to allow parents and doctors time to spot "defects" and legally destroy "defective" children.
In 1989, a group of 167 American pro-abortion scientists and doctors uttered the following absurdity to the U.S. Supreme Court in the WEBSTER case: "There is no scientific consensus that a human life begins at conception, at a given stage of fetal development, or at birth." Reread the last phrase.
We must never forget Dr. Mengele. In a recent survey, three out of four doctors, said they would not keep a handicapped baby alive. Recently, the topic on an afternoon talk show was whether we have the right to allow a handicapped child to live!
Handicapped persons offer us the special gift of their kind and gentle love. I know no family of a Downs Syndrome child who does not cherish that love, as my family cherishes the love of little Michael, our autistic grandson.
When I was chairman of the Killingly Town Council, the vice-chairman was a very dear friend of mine, Miss Gertrude Stone. She had been born with spina-bifida and needed crutches and braces to walk. She was a warm and generous person. Shortly before she died, she was honored as "Person Of The Year" by the Danielson Lions Club and received recognition from the Northeast Department of Health and the area Four H Clubs for her service to the people of Northeast Connecticut. If she were born today, she would probably be killed. Her parents were poor farmers.