During the anti-abortion struggle in England in 1966–1967 in which I took part against Steel‘s bill in the British House of Commons to legalize abortion I pointed out that if his bill was passed it would not be long before the British Parliament also legalized euthanasia. Such has in fact now happened. Legalized murder of both the unborn and the very old is now part of the law of the United Kingdom.
It seems that history is about to repeat itself over here in the United States. First the Supreme Court legalized the murder of the unborn up to the end of the second trimester in January, 1973. Now an American court has tried to legalize euthanasia last January. I refer to the case of Earle Spring, a former pharmacist from the Springfield, Massachusetts area who said “I want to live,” but who was condemned to death by an American judge so that he could “die with dignity.” National and international pressure forced a decision by a higher court to place Mr. Spring back on dialysis treatment.
In the first case of attempted legalization of euthanasia in the United States, Massachusetts Probate Court Judge Sanford Keedy ordered upon January 18th of this year that 78-year-old Earle Spring be removed from the dialysis treatment, medication, and special diet necessary to his survival—so that he might “die with dignity.”
Later, after Spring had already missed four dialysis treatments and was beginning to show the effects of uremic poisoning, Judge Keedy refused to reverse his decision, even when the court-appointed guardian for Spring protested that no thorough medical or psychiatric examination of Spring had taken place in over a year.
Later that same day, Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Judge Francis Quirico, after much national and international pressure had been mobilized on Spring’s behalf, ordered that he be placed back on dialysis. Quirico acted on the basis of an affidavit presented by a doctor and a nurse who had spoken to Spring at the Holyoke Geriatric Center.
The nurse’s affidavit said: “I asked him if life was good. He said, ‘Yes!’ I asked him if he wanted to die. He thought for a moment and said ‘No.’”
The affidavit of Dr. Nelson Gillet said: “He was able to make a weak expression of his desire to live. My supposition is that his state may be worsened by the lack of dialysis and medical treatment.” Earle Spring did not want to “die with dignity” as the advocates of euthanasia put it.
In his book The Right to Live and The Right to Die, Dr. C. Everett Koop, a famous pediatric surgeon explains what euthanasia means. He writes:
The term euthanasia comes from the Greek and means painless, happy death (eu-well, plus thanatos–death). The Euthanasia Society of America, founded in 1938, defines euthanasia as the “termination of human life by painless means for the purpose of ending severe physical suffering.” Gradually the meaning of the word changed from the connotation of easy death to t he actual medical deed necessary to make death easy. Finally it reached the idea of “mercy killing.” . . . The common synonym for euthanasia in both lay and professional vocabularies has been mercy killing . . . . The deliberate killing of one human being by another, no matter what the motivation might be, is murder. Some distinction is usually made between a positive, decisive, death–producing act and the act of permitting death to occur by with holding life-support mechanism or life-extending procedures” (page 95, Tyndale House, 1976).
Today in the United States, the Hospice Movement, the Right To Die advocates as well as the Euthanasia Society, with the aid of the atheist liberal press, have succeeded in creating a climate of public opinion in America in which families assent to the murder of their own parents and grandparents.
In 1978, Kennedy was the keynote speaker at the First Annual Convention of the Hospice Movement, Inc. in the United States, itself modeled on the hospice program in Great Britain. In St. Christopher’s Hospice in London, however, those deemed terminally ill are not merely left to “die with dignity.” They are fed what is called the Brompton Mixture—composed of heroin, cocaine, chloroform water, alcohol, and tranquilizers—every three hours until the patient dies.
In every case, the basic arguments offered by the advocates of the “right to die” movement put forward precisely: cost-cutting and mercy killing.
On January 20, 1980, the Boston Globe hailed the Keedy order to take Earle Spring off dialysis as follows:
“Individuals can legally stipulate in advance that they agree to the withdrawal of medical care if it should become clear that they have lost the capacity to recover from a debilitating condition. But many are understandably reluctant to enter into an agreement that runs counter to the impulses of essential hopefulness that prevails in mankind. Given that reality, the courts will in many cases become the final arbiter in decisions involving the right to die. The decision in the Spring case marked a humane step on that difficult course.”
Dr. John Shear, Earle Spring’s attending physician was more explicit. Upon hearing of the Quirico decision to return Spring to dialysis treatment, he said: “This will totally bottle up health care and escalate costs. People will have to be kept in ICU‘s indefinitely with incredible implications.
“The decisions about stopping treatment are made perhaps hundreds of times a day in Massachusetts. It is a very, very common thing. People get into situations where you can prolong life in a variety of ways: tubes, ventilators, pacemakers, all kinds of things can be done today. At times you have to make quality of life decisions. Patients do this when they are competent.”
In hearings, January 24th, 1980, the attorney who had pressed for Spring’s murder, Ms Marguerite Dolan, complained to the court that the placing of Spring on a dialysis machine the previous night—as Judge Quirico had ordered—was “an extraordinary practice,” when there is, she claimed, a recognized shortage of dialysis machines. She protested the court decision had greatly inconvenienced the dialysis center. Judge Quirico reminded the attorney that had Mr. Spring not received dialysis that same night, he would in all likelihood have died.
I submit that euthanasia is contrary to the law of God and of the Nuremberg law entitled Crimes Against Humanity under which any form of euthanasia is outlawed.
The Christian view of this matter is summed up in the words of Job used in the Anglican Burial Office: “The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away (Life), blessed be the Name of the Lord.” Only God the Creator of the soul of a man or a woman has the right to call it home out of this world. Once we allow judges and doctors to play at God over the sanctity of innocent human life, whether at the beginning of a human life as in the case of an unborn child or at the end of a human life as in the case of an elderly person.
Judge Sanford Keedy’s decision to take Mr. Spring off dialysis was not only against the law of Almighty God Himself but also against the great Nuremberg law which reads in part:
“Namely, exterminating, enslavement, deportation and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population before or during the war: regardless whether or not in violation of the domestic law of the country where perpetrated.” (emphasis added)
Today in the United States, Senator Edward Kennedy’s Right to Die Movement, the Hospice Movement, the Death with Dignity advocates promote openly.
The Earle Spring case is a case of an elderly person who was sentenced to death by a court in 1980 in the United States of America. But how many other hundreds of thousands of elderly, driven to destitution by the Social Security System and by inflation and driven to despair by illness have been left to silently die? Euthanasia is the end to which Carter’s federal government’s policy now leads. Today there are 1 million Americans in nursing homes who have been reduced to absolute penury. About 30 percent of these people are ruled incompetent, and are thus placed in immediate danger by the Earle Spring case. The continuing waves of nursing home scandals appearing in the daily press reflect a hideous process of malicious neglect of our aged. How many of our aged have been left to “die with dignity”? Probably as many Americans as have been aborted as yet unborn.
E. L. Hebden Taylor is Associate Professor of Sociology at Dordt College and minister of St. Anselm’s Anglican Catholic Parish, Sioux Center, Iowa 51250.