Posted on 11/22/2003 11:44:49 AM PST by sweetliberty
People already have the right to refuse unwanted treatment, and suicide is not illegal. What we oppose is a public policy that singles out individuals for legalized killing based on their health status. This violates the Americans With Disabilities Act, and denies us equal protection of the laws.
Disability opposition to this ultimate form of discrimination has been ignored by most media and courts, but countless people with disabilities have already died before their time. —Not Dead Yet: The Resistance, a disability rights organization, Forest Park, Illinois, October 28, 2003
In 1920, a prominent German lawyer, Karl Binding, and a distinguished German forensic psychiatrist, Alfred Hoche, wrote a brief but deadly book, The Permission To Destroy Life Unworthy of Life. In his new book, The Coming of the Third Reich (Penguin), Richard Evans notes that Binding and Hoche emphasized that "the incurably ill and the mentally retarded were costing millions of marks and taking up thousands of much-needed hospital beds. So doctors should be allowed to put them to death."
Then came Adolf Hitler, who thought this was a splendid, indeed capital, idea. The October 1, 2003, New York Daily News ran this Associated Press report from Berlin:
"A new study reveals Nazi Germany killed at least 200,000 people because of their disabilities—people deemed physically inferior, said a report compiled by Germany's Federal Archive. Researchers found evidence that doctors and hospital staff used gas, drugs and starvation to kill disabled men, women and children at medical facilities in Germany, Austria, Poland and the Czech Republic. . . .
"The Nazis launched the drive to root out what they called 'worthless lives' [and 'useless eaters'] in the summer of 1939, pre-dating their full-scale organization of the Holocaust, in which they killed 6 million Jews." (Emphasis added).
The more than 200,000 "worthless lives" terminated by the Nazis before the Holocaust included few Jews. Most of those killed were other Germans considered unfit to be included in "the master race."
Among the defendants at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders and their primary accomplices in the mass murder were German doctors who had gone along with the official policy of euthanasia. An American doctor, Leo Alexander, who spoke German, had interviewed the German physician-defendants before the trials, and then served as an expert on the American staff at Nuremberg.
In an article in the July 14, 1949, New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Alexander warned that the Nazis' crimes against humanity had "started from small beginnings . . . merely a subtle shift in emphasis in the basic attitude of the physicians. It started with the acceptance, basic in the euthanasia movement, that there is such a thing as life not worthy to be lived." That shift in emphasis among physicians, said Dr. Alexander, could happen here, in America.
Actually, the devaluing of apparent "imperfect life" had begun years before, in the United States. Various academics, in and out of the medical profession, had successfully advocated and instituted a eugenics movement—the perfecting of future generations of Americans by deciding who, depending on their hereditary genes, would be allowed to have children. The unfit would no longer be permitted to reproduce.
These American eugenicists provided German proponents of a "master race" with inspiration. As Robert Jay Lifton wrote in his invaluable book The Nazi Doctors (Basic Books), "A rising interest in eugenics [in America had] led, by 1920, to the enactment of laws in twenty-five states providing for compulsory sterilization of the criminally insane and other people considered genetically inferior." (Emphasis added).
Paying attention in Germany, Heinrich Himmler, one of Hitler's executioners, said the Nazis were "like the plant-breeding specialist who, when he wants to breed a pure new strain . . . goes over the field to cull the unwanted plants." Under the Nazis, there were eugenics courts to decide who could have children. In the United States Supreme Court (Buck v. Bell, 1927), Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, ruling that 18-year-old Carrie Buck should be involuntarily sterilized, famously wrote:
"If instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing of their kind. . . . Three generations of imbeciles are enough." Only Justice Pierce Butler dissented.
In this country, the eugenics movement lost its cachet for a time because the Nazis had gone from sterilization of the disabled to herding the religiously, racially, and politically unfit into gas chambers.
But there has been an American revival of eugenics in certain elite circles. A few years ago, an archconservative who had talked with some of the present-day, would-be purifiers of the American stock told me they were delighted at the deaths from AIDS of homosexuals.
But to protect the disabled from "mercy" killings, as well as eugenicists, another movement was forming here. Not long before he died, Dr. Alexander read an article in the April 12, 1984, New England Journal of Medicine by 10 physicians—part of the growing "death with dignity" brigade. They were from such prestigious medical schools as Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Virginia. These distinguished healers wrote that when a patient was in a "persistent vegetative state," it was "morally justifiable" to "withhold antibiotics and artificial nutrition (feeding tubes) and hydration, as well as other forms of life-sustaining treatment, allowing the patient to die." They ignored the finding that not all persistent vegetative states are permanent.
After reading the article, Dr. Alexander said to a friend: "It is much like Germany in the '20s and '30s. The barriers against killing are coming down."
Next week: The growing conviction among American doctors, bioethicists, and hospital ethics committees that it is "futile" to try to treat certain patients, and therefore, medical professionals should have the power to decide—even against the wishes of the family—when to allow these valueless lives to end.
If the courts finally permit the husband of brain-damaged Terri Schiavo to continue to press for her death by starvation—by again removing her feeding tube—more of the barriers to killing may come down in other states. So this isn't only about Terri Schiavo. It could be about you
Ahhhhhh ... the poor vampire Felos, so willing and eager to suck the blood out of innocents, so willing to go to the mat for a client who has consistently shown contempt and neglect for his legal wife, while making babies with his whore. Does Felos have a heart for the full truth, does he care what Carl Iyers or Cyndi Shook or others have to say about Terri and Michael? Does he have a conscience? Or is money and fame and that book just about all he has room for?
Ah yes, that book Felos has talked about writing, just when things were going along so smoothly, and Terri was suffering from starvation and dehydration....it all fell apart. Now it isn't Terri who is hungry....the table has turned and it is Felos who is hungry...he needs an end to his story, and he wants it to be the one HE SCRIPTED!
But alas, suddenly people are becoming aware of his absolute horrific tactics, learning of his unique ability to 'commune with the soul' of those who cannot speak, and therefore able to determine their wishes. ( Gag me....BIG TIME! }
People are learning of the testimony and affidavits and etc. etc. etc that has been thrown out of the courts at Felos's marvelous manipulation of our rule of law. WHY....we have even learned that Felos and MS put medical records of Terri under lock and key.....whatever for???? Yeah....we are learning about this monster, alright.
Felos-if you are aware of this thread and others involving Terri-good. Know that we are praying for you, understand that you get a deep sense of 'satisfaction' from the death of those who are imperfect, and hope deeply, that this time, you lose.
Your smoothness, your connections, your ability to deny the reality of what Terri has suffered, your ability to hide a person who is NOT TERMINALLY ILL or even in a PVS state in a HOSPICE has not gone un-noticed. And we are here to stop you, with God's help, anyway we legally can.
When you and MS get together with the ACLU to plot Terri's death, full of ignorance or devoid of conscience, we are right there, over your shoulder, praying to God Almighty, the giver of life, the One who gave us our souls and is full of love.
And as our President says, we will prevail.
Is the judge in question "over" Judge Greer? I believe he is. When the judge in question ruled that the deposition could go forward (the doctor answering questions as pertains to the bone scan), did the deposition taken pertain to the case before Judge Greer? (I believe so, i.e., this is the case requesting that MS be disqualified as guardian). If this is true, then, yes, this is part of the DISCLOSURES (the gathering of evidence, i.e., the doctor's testimony AND the bone scan) which will now become a part of this particular case.
The admission of the deposition into evidence would be up to Judge Greer or whoever is hearing the case. On the other hand, I would expect that the deposition would become public whether or not Greer admits it. IANAL, but if things are as I understand them, Greer may decide that it would look very bad to refuse the deposition if it contains information that any ordinary person would deem relevant to the case.
I'd add, freekitty, that the Clintons CAUSED bad things to escalate in America and, as such, I have one constant prayer ..
I pray that the Lord would render the Clintons, and all their minions .. powerless and voiceless and nameless and faceless and useless and homeless and penniless .. that He would strip them bare before the world, leaving only their immortal souls, and it is for these souls I pray.
I haven't seen Judge Greer do a whole lot since the passage of "Terri's Law", and I don't recall any of it being unfavorable toward Terri. I've wondered whether he's turned a corner, but it's hard to tell for sure.
I'm not afraid of DEATH, no. I am afraid of state-sanctioned, court-mandated, estranged-husband-initiated KILLING. See the difference?
If Terri is allowed to be killed, it will set the precedence for allowing others (who are very much alive) to be killed as well. Down's Syndrome children? Yup. Elderly bedridden? Yup. Paralysis victims? Yup. IQ below 50? 60? 90? Where's the line? Who gets to draw the line? Felos? Greer? Mikie? You?
By the way, chas, did you even read the article at the head of this thread? I would suggest you at least scroll back to post #33. It's a real eye-opener.
LOL; in limine literally means: on the threshold; at the beginning.
It is a motion filed shortly before the hearing (with no trial) or trial (before jury). "Immediately, upon seeing the words Motion in Limine in the motion’s Caption, the judge knows it deals with evidence and with how it will be handled at trial."
This website discusses a bit better than I can:
Motions in Limine are called “threshold motions” that anticipate and seek to control the trial’s conduct. It is equitable in nature and therefore well within the court’s discretion to grant or deny. It is a useful and powerful device to assure a fair trial, but is rarely the basis for a reversal on appeal – indeed, though there may be some, I am unaware of any case reversed solely because the court denied a Motion in Limine.
My elderly aunt chose to die by refusing to eat solid food or drink the milk shakes brought to her by family members, though they tell me she did take a sip of water every now and then. Death came in only two weeks.
Funny thing (wrong choice of words, perhaps) about starvation, within four or five days, the human body no longer feels hunger pangs. The opposite effect occurs when hydration is denied. Extreme thirst is torture.
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