The Myth of Mercy Killing
Quote:
Over the past several decades, America has witnessed a strange and subtle shift in how society views life. In the 1960s, the shift began as some states began to remove the criminal penalties for abortion. In the 1970s, the U.S. Supreme Court Roe v. Wade decision put the federal government’s stamp of approval on abortion nationwide. Today, the value of life is being obscured at the other end of the spectrum as courts grant the elderly and sick the so-called “right to die.”
[read the full length article here]
I found this article while searching for something similar
It goes on as any other debate article would until you come to this:
Quote:
In A Sign For Cain, the eminent Dr. Fredric Wertham documented exhaustively the physician-sponsored mass murder of civilians in pre-World War II Germany. Well before they were dismantled and moved to the concentration camps, gas chambers were installed in six leading psychiatric hospitals. Under the guise of “help for the dying,” “mercy killings,” and “destruction of life devoid of value,” university professors of psychiatry, hospital directors and their staff members systematically exterminated hundreds of thousands of “superfluous people”—mental patients, the elderly, and sick and handicapped children. Criteria for such “undesirables” included “useless eaters,” the unfit, unproductive and misfit.
Wertham stressed the concept of “life not worth living” was not a Nazi invention. As early as the 1920s, respected physicians wrote about “absolutely worthless human beings” and the urgently necessary “killing of those who cannot be rescued.” In fact, even in 1895, a widely used German medical textbook advocated the “right to death.”
However, in 1939, a note from Adolf Hitler to his own private doctor and chancellery officials extended “the authority of physicians” so that “a mercy death may be granted to patients who according to human judgment are incurably ill.” Nearly the same language has been used in the various “right to die” decisions of America’s high courts.
I would like to read other's thoughts on this article, as this specific excerpt troubles me immensely...
Re: The penut gallery speaks
Quote:
Originally posted here by zepherin
Hell is full of good intentions and desires.
Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (1091-1153)
if i'm not mistaken that quote should read "The road to hell is paved with good intentions."
Re: Re: The penut gallery speaks
Quote:
Originally posted here by 8*B@LL
if i'm not mistaken that quote should read "The road to hell is paved with good intentions."
That was never part of the original quote:
(Samuel) Johnson said something close, but he was following in others' footsteps. In Boswell's Life of Johnson, in an entry marked April 16, 1775, Boswell quotes Johnson as saying (on some other occasion), "Hell is paved with good intentions." Note, no prefatory "the road to..." Boswell's editor, Malone, added a footnote indicating this is a 'proverbial sentence,' and quoting an earlier 1651 source (yet still not in the common wording).
Robert Wilson, in the newsgroup alt.quotations, provided two other sources prior to Johnson. John Ray, in 1670, cited as a proverb "Hell is paved with good intentions." Even earlier than that, it's been attributed to Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (1091-1153), as "Hell is full of good intentions or desires." Just how it got to the road to Hell being paved this way, and not Hell itself, I don't know.
http://www.samueljohnson.com/apocryph.html#6