What year are we in, anyway?

In yet another revealing moment for nationalized health care, a highly respected British ethicist said that dementia sufferers should get euthanized in order to preserve resources for healthier people.   Baroness Warnock, described as “Britain’s leading moral philosopher”, said that the government should license people to be “put down” and stop being a drain on society:

The veteran Government adviser said pensioners in mental decline are “wasting people’s lives” because of the care they require and should be allowed to opt for euthanasia even if they are not in pain.

She insisted there was “nothing wrong” with people being helped to die for the sake of their loved ones or society.

The 84-year-old added that she hoped people will soon be “licensed to put others down” if they are unable to look after themselves. …

Lady Warnock said: “If you’re demented, you’re wasting people’s lives – your family’s lives – and you’re wasting the resources of the National Health Service.

If simply reading the title wasn’t enough to make me want to vomit, the rest of the article did the trick. I was caught in between a surly, “Yeah this was popular elsewhere about 70 years ago” and “Where exactly are all these ‘choices’ leading us?” And sure enough, it didn’t take long before Trig came up, when I spotted mention of him in the comments section.

Trig Palin is the infant son of Alaska’s Governor Sarah Palin, the nominee for Vice President of the United States; he has Down’s Syndrome and Palin and her husband knew about it before the rest of us Alaskans even knew she was pregnant. Once the initial shock wore off Trig’s diagnosis became part of the way life sometimes is. We knew she would love him no matter what and for most of us, this is what we really expect of a parent. Little did I know, the day I stood in a special ed classroom as a substitute teacher reading the headline in the Daily Dead Fish Wrapper, that we would come to where we are today: arguing about the worth of a disabled child and wondering how much further all of this would go.

Further? Aren’t we regressing? Now we are talking about killing people “just to clear out a hospital bed”? (I suppose skipping laundry day didn’t save enough money for them.) Am I naive to be surprised that there are people in the world who aren’t sufficiently revolted at the Nazi treatment of those they deemed “useless eaters”? Lady Warnock talks here only about those suffering from senility, but with rising costs and no end in sight for the NHS financial roadblocks, not to mention the disgusting habit some Americans have of trying to be European (read: demand for socialised medicine as well as installation of “European” habits), it seems only a matter of time before some people on this side of the pond start rabble rousing for this protocol as well. So not only would we have socialised medicine should these misguided people get their way, we would be paying for the state to murder our weakest citisens. After all, someone has to pay for the injection and disposal of the bodies. Or maybe they will dump them in a mass grave because it’s cheaper? Then, in about another century or so when people have come to their senses, the graves will be found, much like those found in western Germany in 2006.

So where else will this regression lead us? Will we pick a random age, perhaps based on some formula that determines when senility sets in, and go backwards until our murderous economy starts picking off children? Or are we going to skip all that fuss and just shoot where necessary? One commentator speculates that abortions, once deemed an option in the idea of “choice,” will become mandatory in cases of Down’s Syndrome (or other disabilities). To be honest, as frighteningly futuristic as it sounds, the way some people are carrying on about their “shock” and “revulsion” that Governor Palin allowed this pregnancy to come to term–and Carol Fowler’s repulsive statement, that Palin’s primary qualification to be vice president appears to be she hasn’t had an abortion, the possibility is not so remote as I once would have thought it to be. But I am heartened for the moment by the swift outrage Cathryn Friar noted in her blog, a site that not incidentally was close to the top of Google’s search results. Blogs seem to be doing the job of the so-called “real media” these days.

A few years ago the media were all over Terri Schiavo’s story and although I did see some, erm, legitimate points raised by her parents’ opponents, I did think it probably was wise for me to stay clear of Florida, since my toddler son was very sickly at the time. I did entertain the notion I was exaggerating my fear following disbelief and shock, but look where we are now. If “pro choice” advocates–who in my opinion peddle abortion these days like it’s a birthday ear-piercing, and show such disdain and disgust for the “incorrect” choice–keep pushing this agenda, all their loose ends combined with admiration for anything European could go to places we were previously too humane to even think about.

I don’t want to believe this, really, but it has already been done. The Nazis killed people who were a burden–including old people and disabled children–we know this. China imposes strict reproductive laws in the interest of slowing the population boom. The massive number of adoptions in the US of Chinese babies is partly a result of this situation: women secretly birth babies and then abandon them, often in places the infants are sure to be found and cared for. Who knows how many abortions occur each year, or the rate of infanticide following the births of healthy as well as disabled babies. Countless times I have heard this population control practise defended, its apologists typically citing statistics about the mouths China would have to feed if the controls weren’t in place. What many of these people forget to mention is that the results of the laws aren’t because of some magical Chinese fecundity, but because traditional thinking in China, as in many other countries, values–nay, practically worships–males over females, so much so that women abort fetuses or kill female newborns because they desire the place in society in which they will be honored as the mother of a son. Or simply because they don’t want to be humiliated, mocked, ostrasised or rejected for mothering female children, and they would rather not have to throw themselves down their respective village wells.

The United States has come a long way in this respect, and many feminists have worked hard to ensure girls and women a place in society that didn’t reside in the margins. We’ve seen some mistakes along the way, such as the über critical stance some have taken on housewives who choose to be so. But now I am wondering if this is a precursor to what we are seeing currently: that feminists such as Gloria “only a chromosome” Steinem and those who head NOW have all along been leading us to believe they care about our interests, and will fight to the death to ensure we are, as a class and as half the population, protected from the ugly machinations of a society that already has a tendency to reduce much to numbers…so long as we are worthy of such protection. To be worthy, it seems to be coming apparent, women should not live in certain places, hunt for their own food, be religious, have attended “inferior” universities, have any sort of sympathy for gun ownership, be against abortion in any way, work when there are children at home, or dare give birth to an infant known beforehand to be disabled.

I hardly have the stomach to mention Trig’s name, especially at this particular part of the piece, but progression of this mentality leads me to wonder how the threads might connect their ends to each other as this child grows up. He is born to a loving family and the general public in his land has shown great support for him, his mother and his family. But somewhere in there is something simmering, something I didn’t even know existed, and that is the hate for people like him, those “useless eaters” who will continue to burden the society with their special needs and sometimes weighty medical conditions–people who as they grow older garner less sympathy from some NOWsters than those who have committed heinous, barbaric and horrifically unimaginable crimes and sit on death row, eating up taxpayer money and sympathisers’ imaginations that often even don’t recall the names of their underdog heroes’ victims.

As I write this I am unsure whether Lady Warnock’s sentiments are being weighed with any real seriousness by any people in the United States, some citisens of which are disposed to believe that what governments do in Europe ought to be replicated here. Alaskans are all too familiar with the frustration and aggravation of such standardisation, and employ a beloved and frontier maxim to express how we feel about the matter: “We don’t give a damn how they do it Outside.” Outside (with capital “O”), being anything that is not Alaska, includes Europe as well as Chicago or Miami or Los Angeles, and while we admire some of the best of the continent (Icelandic sweaters, Nutella, Quark), Euro-centric practises most often simply don’t fit, not in Alaska and not in the United States. The worst of them absolutely have no place in our society. I feel certain a lot of Europeans believe this has none in theirs, either. If only that message could get into the heads of those Americans who bow and worship shamelessly at the alter of All that is European. Instances like this probably embarass them as much as they do us.