COLLECTION OF Quotes

"If we now return to the semantics of voluntary euthanasia let us try replacing "kill" by "help to die ... when we do this many of the most emotive objections to its legalization fade away." [Jean Davis, President of the World Federation of the Right to Die Societies [LAST RIGHTS #6, Oct/Nov.:13]
 

Remember how most of us were concerned about the wonders of medical technology keeping us alive artificially, making us slaves to tubes and machines? Remember how we all were advised to have living wills which would designate what we didn't want done to us if we were in final and desperate straits? Remember all the money we paid to lawyers to draw up such documents and how when it was done, we felt safe. Forget it. You are not safe."  ~  Barbara Simpson I'm your doctor and I'm here to kill you, WorldDaily ... a review of Culture of Deat by Wesley J. Smith 
 

"People with Down Syndrome have a different view of life.  They seem to be able to detect the essential elements of life, and by their frankness and lack of social niceties they can cut through many formalities, disarm us from our prejudice and get to the heart of relationships.  Jean Vanier, taking a person with Down's Syndrome to a wide beach in France, asked him to draw a picture of joy in the sand.  This person responded, "the beach is not big enough." Philip G. Ney, MD, FRANZCP, RPsych ,Marie A. Peeters, MD Eugenics and Down's Syndrome

 

"You may think that the black man is merely chattel, but 'He bears the impress of his Maker, and is amenable to the laws of God and Man; and he is destined to an endless existence' " (Dred Scott v. Sanford, 1857)
 

I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and in the lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers. Viktor E. Frankl ~ 1905 - 1997
 

``We have always predicted that once you start looking at killing as a means to solve problems then you'll find more and more problems where killing can be the solution." Dutch physician, Dr Karl Gunning.

Dr. Fenigsen says the Dutch are not on a slippery slope,  "Dutch doctors who practice euthanasia are not on a slope. From the very beginning they have been at the bottom." Dr Fenigsen found "involuntary euthanasia…is rampant. . ..a staggering 62% of all newborns' and infants' deaths resulted from 'medical decisions,'" further to this, in 1995 alone there were 900 lethal injections given to patients who had not requested euthanasia.. It revealed that 189 were fully competent and could have been consulted about their consent but were not. Fenigsen concludes that "those who contend that it is possible to accept and practice ‘voluntary’ euthanasia and not allow involuntary totally disregard the Dutch reality.” [cite: Richard Fenigsen, "Dutch euthanasia revisited, " Issues in Law & Medicine, Winter 1997 v13 n3 p301-311 ]
 

Health care is concerned with life and should never have anything to do with hastening or causing death. . . . "Each person is special, unique and unrepeatable. . . Excision of the heart or liver from a living human being causes death.  Therefore, it is immoral to remove an unpaired vital organ before death.  Moreover, it is currently not possible to successfully transplant an unpaired vital organ after death.  To satisfy a desire for transplantable organs, an ingenious method was devised to get around these realities: certain living comatose patients were simply defined as "brain dead." . . . We have been forced to accept brain-related criteria for death so that organ transplant teams can obtain vital organs in good physiological condition because an unpaired vital organ taken from a true corpse is not suitable for transplantation. " - cite: LIFE, LIFE SUPPORT and DEATH Principles,Guidelines, Policies and Procedures for Making Decisions to Protect and Preserve Life, (Second Revised Edition) by Paul A. Byrne M.D., FAAP, et al., American Life League Inc.
 

"Doctors have stepped into a right-to-life row following the suggestion some hospital patients should be allowed to die because it costs so much to keep them alive.  The Daily Mail reported that leaked Government papers suggest that they should be denied food and liquid if they fall into a coma or are too ill to speak for themselves." Note: The term "allowed" -is far from the truth.  They are forced to die -a extremely slow, painfully cruel death by dehydration and starvation.   Where is the humanity? Ed., CHN
 

"At one of the trials, {Nuremburg} the chief female nurse, when asked whether she considered the Russians and Poles to have been murdered, answered," Murder? How do you want me to understand murder? They died from injections." But pressed further whether in her opinion that was murder, she answered, "Yes" ". [THE NAZI DOCTORS, BY JAY LIFTON,†:101.]


"The third film, "I Accuse" (Ich klage an, 1941) was unique in that it dealt specifically with medical killing and, in fact, emerged from a suggestion ... that a film be made to persuade the German public to accept the idea of "euthanasia"... the film depicts a physician giving a lethal injection to his incurably ill wife in response to her desperate plea that he do so to relieve her of her terrible pain and suffering. Indeed, a sympathetic member of the jury before whom the physician is eventually tried states categorically that: the most important precondition is always that the patient wants it." ... But "I Accuse" is of respectable artistic quality; and after viewing portions of it, I could understand why doctors I interviewed still felt its impact and remembered the extensive discussion it stimulated among their colleagues and fellow students about the morality of a doctor's aiding incurable patients to achieve the death they long for." [JAY LIFTON, THE NAZI DOCTORS: 49 ]
 

"To distinguish between murder and "mercy killing" would be to cross the line which prohibits any intentional killing, a line which we think it essential to preserve. Nor do we believe that "mercy killing" could be adequately defined, since it would involve determining precisely what constituted a compassionate motive. For these reasons we do not recommend the creation of a new offence." [REPORT OF THE SELECT COMMITTEE ON MEDICAL ETHICS, Vol.I, p.53]
 

Dr Daly warns  "If hospices are above all criticism, and a blind eye is turned to covert euthanasia, there is a risk that, like Terri, other groups of vulnerable people who are not dying will be increasingly accepted by hospices. There is a risk that vulnerable patients who are disabled or elderly, might be misdiagnosed as terminally ill and sent to hospices where they will not receive life sustaining treatment."
 

In 1983, reflecting on the possible outcome of the debate, Daniel Callahan, then director of the Hastings Center, wrote that"...a denial of nutrition, may, in the long run, become the only effective way to make certain that a large number of biologically tenacious patients actually die." [65]  He further predicted, "Given the increasingly large pool of superannuated, chronically ill, physically marginal elderly, it could well become the nontreatment of choice." [66]  He noted, however, that there still was a "deep-seated revulsion" [67] to withholding or withdrawing food from patients.
 

Dr. Helga Kuhse, speaking at the Fifth Biennial Congress of Societies for the Right to Die, held in Nice in September 1984 said: "If we can get people to accept the removal of all treatment and care - especially the removal of food and fluids - they will see what a painful way this is to die and then, in the patient's best interest, they will accept the lethal injection."

"Over the past two decades, the Netherlands has moved from assisted suicide to euthanasia, from euthanasia for the terminally ill to euthanasia for the chronically ill, from euthanasia for physical illness to euthanasia for psychological distress and from voluntary euthanasia to nonvoluntary and involuntary euthanasia." Quoting Herbert.Hendin MD

Bakker 21:36-37

The Committee was also told that, for those physicians who will perform euthanasia, it is always a difficult act.

I know doctors have done it ten times, and the tenth time it is with as much difficulty as the first. It is done on the request of the patient, and it is because the patient is suffering, but it is still very difficult for a doctor. That is my experience.

Leenen 21:67-68

When the Dutch panel was asked if physicians ever said "Never again" after performing euthanasia, one replied:

I was one of them. The first time I performed euthanasia, I said that I would never do it again. One of my patients then asked me to do it for him, and I decided that I could not refuse him, no matter how I felt. I had known him for almost ten years. I also knew his wife and family.

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(Editor's note: here we see 'dances with words'! C. Eckstein)

We had one category for research purposes which was phrased in the following manner: "the explicit intent to shorten the patient's life", not "to kill". As a matter of fact, most doctors who answered that they had performed an NTD [non-treatment decision] with the explicit purpose to hasten the end of the patient's life, meant that they did not want to prolong suffering...

Taken from Palliative Care in Canada The Special Senate Committee on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide Of Life and Death - Final Report June 1995  Appendix M 

"The health care system is supposed to take care of patients and not kill them.  Nations will ultimately be judged by the compassion they show for its most vulnerable citizens, and not the profits they put in the hands of corrupt companies and individuals with no ethics or social conscience."  Audrey Ignatoff

 

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