{"id":218471,"date":"2020-02-16T16:27:34","date_gmt":"2020-02-16T22:27:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.liveaction.org\/news\/?p=218471"},"modified":"2020-02-15T21:33:22","modified_gmt":"2020-02-16T03:33:22","slug":"unworthy-life-nazi-ideology-assisted-death","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.liveaction.org\/news\/unworthy-life-nazi-ideology-assisted-death\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Life unworthy of life’: Nazi ideology lives on in modern-day assisted death movement"},"content":{"rendered":"
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On January 27th, the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz<\/a>, ShoutMyStory.org<\/a> executive director Cynthia Morales emailed supporters about the connection between the Nazi concept of “lebenswurtes leben” (life unworthy of life) and the recommended abortion of preborn babies diagnosed with “incompatible with life” conditions. Strikingly, the same “lebenswurtes leben” concept sounds eerily similar to the ideology of the “right-to-die” movement now active across the United States and throughout Europe.<\/p>\n

Of course, assisted suicide advocates would be quick to claim that the Nazi euthanasia movement<\/a>\u00a0— which first led to the killings of mentally or physically impaired German children, then mentally ill adults, then mentally or physically impaired concentration camp inmates, then Jews, Poles, gypsies, and others — was coercive. The right-to-die movement is all about advocating “freedom” for “qualified terminally ill Americans” to “live and die according to our own beliefs,” per the website of Death with Dignity<\/a>, the organization that’s crafted language for virtually every U.S. assisted suicide law on the books. Just as “lebenswurtes leben” was sequentially applied to larger and larger populations of people, right-to-die legislation casts a progressively wider net of “qualified” candidates.<\/p>\n

READ:\u00a0HORROR: Experimental assisted suicide drugs caused patients to \u2018scream in pain\u2019<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Chillingly, Belgian Federal Control and Evaluation Committee on Euthanasia chairman Wim Distelmans led a group of assisted suicide practitioners to Auschwitz in 2014 (a place he called “inspiring”) because “there is no better place than Auschwitz to ponder the meaning of dignity<\/a>.” Distelmans went on, “When we deal with euthanasia, we must also come to terms with its opposite. In Belgium we use euthanasia in the original sense of the word: It means \u2018good death.\u2019 That\u2019s the problem. We will have to explain over and over that we intend the opposite of what occurred in Auschwitz.\u201d<\/p>\n