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From
LifeDate - Fall 2005.
Nazi
Parallels in America Today
By Ed Szeto, Director of Outreach, Lutherans For Life
“Those who cannot
remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” George Santayana,
philosopher and poet.
Much has been made in
the pro-life community comparing legalized abortion-on-demand in the
United States to the Holocaust in Nazi Germany. Some leaders in the
Jewish community bristle at this comparison and say that we should
not minimize what happened in Nazi Germany to the Jewish people by
using this comparison.
I agree with them.
I am currently reading
The Nazi Doctors by Robert Jay Lifton.1 I began reading
this book because I was attracted by the sub-title of the book:
“Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide.” I wanted to learn
more about how, in the United States today, a profession dedicated
to helping people and saving lives can blatantly take human life in
abortion, physician-assisted suicide, euthanasia, and embryonic stem
cell research.
Dr. Lifton, a Jew,
interviewed twenty-nine Nazi medical professionals (28 were
doctors), twelve Nazi non-medical professionals (e.g. lawyers,
economists, teachers), and eighty survivors of the Auschwitz
concentration camp who had worked in the medical blocks (over half
being doctors) for this book.
The following paragraph
struck me as soon as I read it:
“The Nazis based their justification for direct medical killing on
the simple concept of ‘life unworthy of life’ (lebensunwertes Leben).
While the Nazis did not originate this concept, they carried it to
its ultimate biological, racial, and ‘therapeutic’ extreme.”2
In his introduction to
the book, Dr. Lifton explains a little about the attitude of the
Nazi doctors. He states that the whole program of the doctors was “a
vision of absolute control over the evolutionary process, over the
biological human future.”3 Dr. Lifton continues by
writing:
“Making widespread use
of the Darwinian term ‘selection,’ the Nazis sought to take over the
functions of nature (natural selection) and God (the Lord giveth and
the Lord taketh away) in orchestrating their own ‘selections,’ their
own version of human evolution.”4
In 1920 Alfred Hoche,
professor of psychiatry at the University of Freiburg, co-authored a
paper entitled “The Permission to Destroy Life Unworthy of Life.”
This paper is said to reflect “the general German mood following the
First World War.”5 Dr. Lifton summarizes the section
written by Hoche as follows:
“Hoche, in his section, insisted that such a policy of killing was
compassionate and consistent with medical ethics; he pointed to
situations in which doctors were obliged to destroy life (such as
killing a live baby at the moment of birth, or interrupting a
pregnancy to save the mother). He went on to invoke a concept of
‘mental death’ in various forms of psychiatric disturbance, brain
damage, and retardation. He characterized these people as ‘human
ballast’ . . . and ‘empty shells of human being’—terms that were to
reverberate in Nazi Germany. Putting such people to death, Hoche
wrote, ‘is not to be equated with other types of killing . . . but
[is] an allowable, useful act.’”6
Dr. Lifton lists “five
identifiable steps by which the Nazis carried out the principle of
‘life unworthy of life.’”7 His five steps are listed on
the next page along with the parallel situation in the United
States.
Clearly, comparing
abortion-on-demand in the United States to the Holocaust in Nazi
Germany is not right. The Holocaust was the final step in a plan
created by a society where they thought there were lives not worthy
of life. In American society today, where some are claiming there
are certain lives not worthy of life, abortion-on-demand is just one
step toward the final step.
Did the amniocentesis
test show that the child may have Down syndrome? Abort him! Does the
embryo contain the genetic sequence for cystic fibrosis? Destroy
her! Want to heal a spinal cord injury? Destroy the embryo for his
stem cells! Don’t want to care for a person with a disability?
Starve her to death! Want a “perfect” baby with no diseases? Alter
his genetic makeup!
The Good News is that
all human life is worthy of life. This is not because of what we
look like, what we can do, or what we may do in the future. All
human life is worthy of life because of what God has done with His
creative hands. He created, He creates, and He will create all human
life (Genesis 1:26-27; Psalm 139:13-16). All human life is worthy of
life because of what God has done with His redemptive hands. He
redeemed the whole world through His atoning sacrifice on the cross
(John 3:16; John 10:10).
Because of what God has
done, what He continues to do today, and what He promises to do in
the future, we can say that all human life is worthy of life. No
matter what age, what stage of development, what condition that life
may be in, ALL human life is precious in God’s eyes. And we, as His
children, need to protect ALL human life.
The devaluing of human
life that took Nazi Germany approximately 15 years to attain is now
slowly taking place in the United States of America. The time has
come for God’s children to boldly proclaim His Word and to stand for
life. |
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