From Deutsche Welle (Germany’s international broadcasting company):

Geneticists in Germany on Monday marked the 75th anniversary of the “Prevention of Progeny with Hereditary Diseases Act,” by condemning the euthanization of thousands of handicapped people during the Third Reich.

Deemed “undesirable,” an estimated 400,000 people physically and mentally disabled people were sterilized without their consent during the Nazi regime. Many of those sterilized died as a consequence of the operation, and historians estimate that 200,000 were euthanized as part of the Nazi eugenics program.

The forced sterilization and euthanasia program developed as a consequence of the “law to prevent hereditary diseased offspring,” which was enacted on July 14, 1933 and was based on the controversial theory that one could improve the human race through selective breeding.

From the New York Times, [UK] Times:

A maverick German politician has helped a healthy 79-year-old woman to kill herself, prompting a criminal investigation and sparking a new national debate over assisted suicide.

Bettina Schardt was neither sick nor dying, but had difficulty getting around, no family and few friends. She feared that she might need to move into a nursing home.

Ms. Schardt’s suicide – and Mr. Kusch’s energetic publicizing of it – have set off a national furor over the limits on the right to die, in a country that has struggled with this issue more than most because of the Nazi’s euthanizing of at least 100,000 mentally disabled and incurably ill people.

… The larger lesson of Ms. Schardt’s solitary death may have to do with the way Germany treats its old.

“The fear of nursing homes among elderly Germans is far greater than the fear of terrorism or the fear of losing your job,” said Eugen Brysch, the director of the German Hospice Foundation. “Germany must confront this fear, because fear, as we have seen, is a terrible adviser.”

From the [Melbourne, Australia] Herald Sun, New Zealand Herald, [New South Wales] Daily Telegraph:

Australian newscaster Tracey Spicer (left) says she considered suffocating her mother in 1999 as an “act of mercy” to end her “immense pain and suffering” from pancreatic cancer. The revelation, in an opinion piece, stirred new controversy in a nation that is deeply divided over the recent convictions of two women in the death of a man with Alzheimer’s disease.

Spicer said her intention was to prompt a public discussion, not to persuade Australians either way about whether euthanasia should be legalized. In her commentary, she said, “I knew it was the right thing to do. But as I looked down at the woman who gave me life, I knew that I could not take hers.” Her mother died a few hours later.

(Herald Sun photo.)

From the Sydney Morning Herald, ABC News [Australia] and elsewhere:

In what was perceived as a blow to Australia’s euthanasia movement, two women were convicted of manslaughter and accessory to manslaughter in the death of former airline pilot Graeme Wiley.

Mr. Wylie, 71, died in March 2006 from an overdose of the veterinary drug Nembutal, which family friend Caren Jenning had bought and illegally imported from Mexico, and which his partner Shirley Justins had given to him in their home.

He had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in March 2003 and the case centered on his capacity at the time of his death to decide whether he wanted to commit suicide.

The verdict prompted calls for changes in the law by pro-euthanasia advocates.

From the Ottawa Citizen:

“Deadly Medicine,” a traveling exhibit organized by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, is on display in Ottawa. The exhibit documents the German eugenics movement of the 1930s, in which doctors and scientists worked with the Nazi regime to systematically eliminate so-called “undesirables,” including people with disabilities, first by sterilization, then by murder.

We see how eugenics evolved from the forced sterilization of the “feeble-minded” to the euthanization of “undesirables” and, ultimately, to the slaughter of millions of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and handicapped.

The exhibition is well-crafted but chilling. It leaves one weak in the knees.

Related story from the CBC: “We want people to think about some issues that happen today, since there’s kind of a new biological idealism in the air,” says exhibit curator Susan Bachrach.

See earlier post.

From the Palm Beach Post:

Seven months ago, Karen Weber had a stroke. Now she’s in a nursing home and her family members are battling over whether to remove the feeding tube that keeps her alive. She is paralyzed on her left side and unable to speak, but breathes on her own.

Raymond Weber says his wife is in a vegetative state. He is seeking to get the feeding tube removed and his wife moved to hospice care. Mrs. Weber’s mother says she is alert and responsive. An Okeechobee County judge has issued an injunction blocking the removal of the tube until he decides whether Mrs. Weber is capable of making her own decision.

Columnist Tom Utley in the UK Daily Mail says he’s wary of Debbie Purdy’s efforts to challenge Britain’s assisted suicide law. Purdy (left, celebrating court victory with husband Omar Puente) has multiple sclerosis and says she plans to kill herself at Dignitas, a controversial euthanasia clinic in Switzerland. She says she wants to make sure that her husband will not be prosecuted if he aids her in making arrangements for assisted suicide.

Utley thinks Purdy is really trying to legalize assisted suicide in Britain — a prospect he finds alarming.

In the Netherlands, MPs voted in 2000 to legalise euthanasia, assuring the world: ‘This is only for people who are in great pain and have no prospect of recovery.’

Within three years, more than one per cent of all deaths in Holland were being deliberately inflicted by doctors.

We saw the same phenomenon here with abortion. When it was legalised in 1967, we were assured it would be carried out only if continuing the pregnancy would mean risk to the life or mental health of the mother, risk to the physical or mental health of existing children or ‘substantial’ risk of the child being born ‘seriously handicapped’.

Today, abortion is widely seen simply as an alternative to contraception, and 500 fetuses are killed every day. Do we really want to go down that road with euthanasia?

If so, how long will it be before doctors start bumping off old women like my grandmother, who say they want to die but don’t really mean it?

Related story: Woman wins right to review of law on assisted suicide