Lessons from
the Holocaust
What will go down in history as the most cruel event of the
twentieth century? Probably, the Holocaust. This year
we especially remember that horror because 1995 is the 50th
anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and some of the other
Nazi death camps. The systematic genocide of six million
human beings is hard to comprehend. Yet, it did happen, and
it happened within living memory of many readers, and within a few
hour’s travelling time from where we live today. One of the
most sobering events of my life was to stand, a few years ago, in
the camp at Bergen-Belsen (which, by comparison, was a fairly mild
regime because there were no gas chambers there) and to wander
among the mass graves, where some 50,000 people were buried.
It was a bleak, bleak experience.
How and why did this unthinkable practice come about? A
‘good’ read in this area is Michael Burleigh’s recent book, Death
and Deliverance – Euthanasia in German 1900-1945, published
by Cambridge University Press. The seeds of such wickedness
were sown well before the Nazis came to power. At the turn
of this century Mendel’s work on genetics was rediscovered and
with it came the idea that a eugenic programme could gradually get
rid of the so-called ‘inferior individuals’. In 1920, a
booklet by Binding and Hoche, The Sanctioning of the
Destruction of Lives Unworthy to be Lived, was
published. Within two year Gerhard Hoffman was suggesting to
the German government that mercy killing of the terminally-ill and
‘the exhausted’ should be widened to include crippled and
incurably-ill children; after all, their care was costing the
state a good deal of money. At the time these proposals were
regarded as outlandish; within a decade, they were official German
policy!
In July 1933, six months after Hitler came to power, The Law
for the Prevention of Hereditary Diseased Progeny was
published and between 1934 and 1945 about 400,000 people (or 1% of
the fertile population) were compulsorily sterilised. In
1939 it became compulsory to register the births of all physically
and mentally-handicapped babies. Without examining such
children, a committee of three decided their fate – those to be
killed were taken to special clinics and either given an overdose
of barbiturates or starved to death. The killing of
children, adolescents and young adults soon became routine and
systematic. In 1940, the euthanasia plan called Aktion T-4
was implemented and thousands of psychiatric patients were killed,
mostly by gassing. Once these atrocities were accepted, it
was but a small step down the slippery slope to the mass
extermination of the Jews and others in the death camps throughout
Europe.
There are at least two alarming feature in all of this.
Firstly, the medical profession, the doctors, nurses and
psychiatrists, were so easily persuaded to take in, indeed, to
carry out, these horrors. There is little doubt that without
their collaboration the killings would never have occurred, or at
least, not in such vast numbers. Secondly, there were so few
protesters; half of the victims in their early euthanasia
programmes came from asylums run by churches.
If the Holocaust teaches Christians anything, then surely it is
this: once a society has forgotten the biblical doctrine that men
and women are special because we are ‘made in His image’, and has
instead embraced the Helegian doctrine of ‘rational utility’, then
there are no limits to human cruelty. Could it be, in 50
years’ time, that our grandchildren will wonder how and why we
allowed abortion, infanticide, euthanasia and destructive embryo
experimentation to flourish in our land?
Results from the HFEA Consultation
Last year the Human Fertilisation & Embryology Authority
produced a public consultation document entitled Donated
Ovarian Tissue in Embryo Research & Assisted Conception.
Almost immediately after the July closing date for submissions had
passed, the HFEA issues its analysis. In all, there were
8,946 responses (including a joint one from the British
Evangelical Council and the Evangelical Alliance). One of
the HFEA’s main recommendations was that the use of ova taken from
aborted girl fetuses should not be used for infertility
treatment. Since most people consider such a procedure
disgusting, or at least objectionable, it seemed as though common
sense has prevailed.
However, all is not well. The HFEA has decided to permit research
on ovaries and ova taken from aborted foetuses, cadavers and live
donors. This is sinister for two reasons. First, since
only about 10% of respondents supported this type of research. We
may well ask how the HFEA came to this decision. Could it be
that the HFEA had already made up its mind and the consultation
exercise was a public relations’ stunt? Second, for those at
the forefront of medicine there is a very fine line between treatment
and research – after all, every new treatment must
first be researched. This use of human gametes (whether
donor ova or sperm) as mere biological material coupled with this
blatant disregard of public opinion is a triumph for rational
utility. It will all end badly.
The House of Lords’ Report on Euthanasia
The House of Lords’ Select Committee on Medical Ethics has brought
out a Report on euthanasia. The Report was widely welcomed
by many because it took a unanimous stand against
euthanasia. This was something of a surprise knowing the
ethical perspectives of some of the Select Committee
members. However, such unanimity was possible because of
some fudging of the issues. For example, euthanasia was
defined only as an intervention. Thus, while the Report was
against positive acts aimed at killing the patient, it
says nothing about deliberate omissions aimed at killing
the patient. Furthermore, as the Report rightly states, it
is the intention of the medical staff that is
paramount. However, if it is the doctor’s intention to
shorten the patient’s life, there is no moral difference between
killing by positive acts or killing by deliberate
omissions. This failure to recognise euthanasia by
omission is lamentable, especially in view of the Law Lords’
poorly-reasoned judgement in the Tony Bland case the previous
year.
Social Trends and Ethical Decisions
Some of the ethical seeds of an earlier generation are beginning
to germinate. The number of illegitimate babies is
continuing to rise – 31% of births in the UK are now outside of
marriage. And nearly 6,000 babies are born in the UK to
mothers aged 16 and under. Meanwhile, the proportion of UK
abortions performed through the NHS continues to rise, apparently
because young, sexually-active hospital managers, raised in an
‘abortion-on-demand’ era, are happy to direct the needed cash
towards providing such a service. But the young are not the
only ones to blame for sub-standard ethical practices. A
consultant obstetrician from St George’s Hospital, London and his
boss, who also happened to be the president of the Royal College
of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists – the sort of men we like to
trust – have been caught cheating. They recently published
two research papers, one on a method for transferring a fetus
which was growing outside the Fallopian tubes (a so-called ectopic
pregnancy) to the womb. Now they admit this work was a
fake. The consultant has been dismissed and his boss has
resigned from the presidency of the RCOG.
Infertility and its Treatment
The drive for assisted conception continues to flourish. A
new variant of IVF is intra-cytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI),
which has recently produced its first live-birth in the UK.
This technique if especially aimed at infertile men with immotile
sperm because it takes one sperm and injects it directly into one
ovum; this is then followed by all the regular IVF
procedures. It has also been reported that sperm usually
have a real struggle to reach and penetrate ova and that they need
the help of the contractions produced by the muscles of the
woman’s womb – lack of these is another probable cause of
infertility.
And a group of chemicals called phthalates have now been linked to
male infertility. Phthalates are widely used in the
packaging industry to keep plastics flexible, so even food
wrappers may be a culprit. Clearly, infertility has many
causes – what we need is a decent study of its causes and some
sensible preventative medicine, not all this high-tech IVF
treatment with its attendant ethical problems.
Meanwhile, problems with surrogacy still rumble on. In Italy
a girl has been born from an ovum donated by a woman who died two
years ago. To increase the ethical problems the surrogate
mother who carried her was her father’s sister, that is, the
baby’s aunt! And in America, where there are an estimated
1,500 surrogate births a year, a bachelor father has been charged
with beating to death his five-week-old son before he was due to
hand over $35,000 to the surrogate mother. How can mere
‘breeding’ outside that relationship of marriage produce the
profound loving environment we all yearn for? Since when did
surrogacy ever strengthen family relationships?
Human Embryo Experimentation in the USA
In the recent mid-term US elections the conservative-minded
Republicans took control of the Congress and the House of
Representatives from the libertarian Democrats. Now, for
example, the number of pro-life senators has risen to 19, an
increase of five. This has had some interesting effects on
decision-making in some key ethical areas. For example, in
October 1994, President Clinton was about to give the go-ahead for
public money to be used for human embryo research. Such
funding had previously been banned for nearly a decade because of
the pro-life sympathies of Ronald Reagan and George Bush.
Then two months later, Mr Clinton was under pressure to appease
the new Republican-dominated Congress and so he decided to change
his mind and not fund such experimentation after all. There
can be little doubt that abortion and its associated issues will
become hot items on the 1996 US election agenda. US
pro-lifers can take some heart.
Mother versus Baby and Abortion
In the closing months of 1994 there were two examples of that
extremely rare ‘mother versus baby’ dilemma, where both patients
cannot survive. These are the really difficult cases where a
heart-rending decision has to be made; they are a million miles
away from the ‘social’ abortions that cost the lives of over
170,000 unborn children each year in England and Wales. Both
pregnant mothers had cancer and both knew that the required
chemotherapy would harm their unborn children. Both mothers
therefore refused treatment and both died, but not before sharing
several months with their newborn children. These two women
are the brave mothers, who thought carefully about the issues,
took the awful decision and made the great sacrifice.