No Regard For Life - Part IV
Reprinted from Rape Of A Nation by Jimmy Swaggart
November 2021 |
The Nazi Philosophy
The butchers in Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany, who slaughtered 6 million Jews in their gas ovens in Treblinka and Auschwitz and performed medical experiments on human beings, were a disgrace in the eyes of humanity.16 But the Supreme Court and the physicians who now practice abortion in our land are no better than those Nazi butchers. One day they will answer to God. In the future, broad-scale genetic engineering will probably be introduced in the United States.17 Genetic engineering is the effort to “program” certain traits while “breeding out” undesirable ones. Naturally, the judgment of value or desirability is at the whim of the individual likes or dislikes. Genetic engineering, or genetic manipulation, will be one of the most dramatic ethical issues facing our generation.18 Scientists in the field have as their goal the ultimate control of man’s biological destiny.
Cloning, which means to create a genetic duplicate of an individual organism through asexual reproduction (as by stimulating a single cell to reproduce) is one aspect of genetic engineering. Consider the clonal man: “Bill has no genetic mother. Because there was no mixing of genes from two heredities at his conception, Bill is his father’s twin. He is truly a ‘chip off the old block.’ He not only looks like his father, in a hereditary sense, he is his father with no chance of substantial variation.”19
Sound like science fiction? Nevertheless, at this moment research is going forward on human cloning, and many scientists believe it will be achieved within the next 20 years.
In addition to genetic engineering, “sperm banks” are becoming more acceptable.20 It is no longer necessary to find Mister Right to get the “kind” of baby you desire; all you need to do is buy his sperm from the sperm bank.
Then there are the “test-tube babies” and those born as a result of “fetal adoption,” in which the human fetus of one woman is transplanted into the womb of another. We are told that this could become technologically feasible by the end of the 1980s.21
Strangely enough, at the same time scientists are searching for new ways to develop babies in test tubes and through fetal adoption and genetic engineering, millions of already formed babies are being murdered yearly. What type of thinking is this? What type of society can accept this type of bizarre reasoning?
Is there any difference between modern scientific experiments, wholesale abortion, and Hitler’s crimes in World War II? I think not. The basic aims are identical. In each case, man attempts to play God.
In Genesis 11:5-8, we are told:
“And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men built. And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let Us go down, and there confound their language … So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth.”
I am concerned that men have once again reached the stage where “nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.” I also believe that God is about ready to come down and put a stop to it.
Infanticide
And what about those who have been born but aren’t able to function fully in society? Once murder has been fully accepted as a public problem solver, won’t the sick, the feeble, the aged, and the retarded be next? Why not? They are certainly a problem and an expense to society.
When a nation strays from God, human life (which He considers sacred) loses value. Right now the life of the unborn baby lacks value because the power to attribute worth based on relative and desirable qualities has been delegated to the state. With this occurrence, a precedent has been set, and the push for “quality control” will not stop with the fetus. (Isn’t it amazing how controlled language can suppress the conscience?) By defining these precious lives as less than human and, therefore, devoid of value and respect, they set the stage for another holocaust.
Isn’t it enough that millions of babies have been brutally and painfully murdered? Already on the horizon, we see the infanticide and euthanasia. Scores of the elderly, the handicapped, and others considered “less than human” will succumb to death at the hands of self-made gods claiming motives of mercy. One Nobel Prize-winning scientist has suggested that if a handicapped child “were not declared alive until three days after birth, then all parents could be allowed the choice that only a few are given under the present system. The doctor could allow the child to die if the parents so chose and save a lot of misery and suffering.”22
Doctor C. Everett Koop, famous pediatric surgeon and Christian author says, “This is infanticide. Infanticide in Great Britain usually means the killing of a newborn child by its mother, whereas infanticide in America means the killing of a born infant, whether that death follows the withholding of something essential to the child’s sustenance or a direct act. Infanticide is being practiced widely in Great Britain and the United States, but it is not a public issue in the sense that abortion and euthanasia are. Infanticide is carried out behind the protective façade of a hospital. The number of abnormalities, physical or mental, which seem to provide motivation for infanticide grows by the month. There seems to be a new, unwritten right developing in the minds of many — the right to a perfect child.”23
It seems that everyone is clamoring for his rights. Some have gone so far as to promote “the right to die.” Although different people use the phrase to mean different things, the bottom line is that death is not a right, but a fate we can’t escape. Each of us expects to die, and we can desire to die with dignity. However, promoters of the “right-to-die” philosophy actually endorse three very different concepts under the heading of “euthanasia.”
“Euthanasia,” strictly defined, means “mercy killing.” A rhetorical smoke screen surrounds this matter, however. Today, euthanasia has been expanded to include “death with dignity” and “death selection.”
Death Selection
Death with dignity essentially means allowing a terminally ill patient to die naturally rather than employing extraordinary means to preserve life. Mercy killing, on the other hand, not only allows the person to die but actually assists him in dying by inducing painless death. Euthanasia is sometimes referred to as “the good death,” assuming that contributing to a person’s death is actually an “act of mercy.”
In the case of death selection, babies considered hopelessly handicapped are left to die. Death selection is most commonly practiced in cases of Down’s syndrome and spina bifida. Babies born with spina bifida have no skin or tissue over the spinal cord and nerves — and often the spinal cord is incomplete. Eighty percent have some degree of paralysis and urinary tract disorders. The complications are so devastating that many doctors advise against treatment.
Doctor Koop says, “To take a child who has an easily correctable lesion and to declare that his life is not worth living, and withhold food, has to be called starvation. It’s homicide. I suppose it’s really infanticide in terms of the law.”24
Doctor David G. McClone, neurosurgeon, has made Children’s Memorial Hospital Clinic on Chicago’s north side a national center for the surgery and care of spina bifida patients. He says, “Physicians by their code of ethics should not be dispensers of death. I’m appalled to hear a physician say that it may be justifiable under certain circumstances to deny a child food, water, and heat.”25
There has recently been a heightened public concern about the adequacy of medical treatment for newborn infants with birth defects. It is becoming more common to allow infants to die than to treat their defects. The reported deaths of handicapped infants (such as those with Down’s syndrome), who have been deliberately allowed to die by withholding treatment, have begun to shock the American public.
Infant homicide occurs daily in America through the willful withholding of medical-surgical care (and in some cases, by withholding food and water). One study at Yale-New Haven Medical Center showed that 14 percent of all infant deaths were related to withholding treatment.26
Even the most enthusiastic supporter of legalized abortion might not have pictured the quantum leap from abortion to infanticide. But then again, those who recommend abortion would probably use their same arguments to rationalize infanticide.
Consider the well-publicized case of Baby Doe. In April 1982, an Indiana court allowed a six-day-old infant to be starved to death. The parents of the child refused surgery for their infant, a victim of Down’s syndrome, to repair his deformed esophagus. It was a case of infanticide. If Mr. and Mrs. Doe had known their child would have been deformed and retarded, it presumably would have been a case of abortion instead.
The irony in the “Doe” case was that the court not only allowed the parents to evade their responsibilities but also prevented anyone else from assuming them. At least 10 couples offered to adopt Baby Doe, but the court decreed that it was the right of the parents to let their baby die, and this outweighed any rights the child might have had.27
John Whitehead declared, “Infanticide, once unthinkable, burst into the open and became thinkable — a reality!”28
16 William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (New York: Simon ad Schuster, 1960), p. 979.
17 Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave (New York: Bantam Books, 1980), p. 147.
18 Lane P. Lester and James C. Hefley, Cloning: Miracle or Menace? (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 1980), p. 135.
19 Ibid., p. 35.
20 Paul Bagne, “High-Tech Breeding,” Mother Jones, August, 1983, p. 23.
21 Robert A. Freitas, Jr., “Fetal Adoption: A Technological Solution to the Problem of Abortion Ethics,” The Humanist, May-June 1980.
22 James D. Watson, “Children From the Laboratory,” Prism, May, 1973, p. 13.
23 C. Everett Koop, op. cit., p. 114.
24 C. Everett Koop, cited in Death in the Nursery, a documentary film by Carleton Sherwood, Kennedy Foundation.
25 Sherwood, Death in the Nursery, op. cit.
26 R. S. Duff and A. G. M. Campbell, “Moral and Ethical Dilemmas in the Special Care Nursery,” New England Journal of Medicine, Vol. 289, p. 890.
27 Stephen Chapman, “From Abortion to Infanticide,” Chicago Tribune, April 22, 1982.
28 John W. Whitehead, The Stealing of America (Westchester, IL: Crossway Books, 1983), p. 43.
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