Yes, I am Asking. And Yes, I Mean It

They Call Us Nazis and Then They Support Policies that Hitler Would Have Adored. Make That Make Sense.

Like many of you, I follow multiple Stacks. I love reading what my fellow residents of Substackistan have to say. I get fresh insights. I gain valuable knowledge. Somedays I read things that hold no surprises for me. Some days I read things that make my jaw drop. Today I read something that has me all fired up and makes me want to freak out all over the place. I’m five seconds from losing it here.

I happened to be reading from a group called Secular Pro-Life and I came across this post. One of their guest posters had a pre-natal child diagnosed with Spina Bifida. What the doctors told her has me incensed. To wit:

What aspects, if any, did you dislike about the way your medical team handled the situation?

They told me WITH my 12 year old step daughter in the room. They told me the worst case scenario. They asked me multiple times if I wanted to abort the baby.

What recommendations do you have for medical providers who are giving parents prenatal screening results?

To share clearly best case, and worst case scenarios. To only bring up termination one time during the process, if at all.

So, upon receiving a diagnosis of spina bifida, a mother was repeatedly requested to execute her child for the crime of being handicapped. Seriously. The medical staff wanted her to get rid of the kid because he had spina bifida.

This one hits me a little harder than it would if it was a different birth defect. When I was very young (we moved away from that neighborhood when I was eight or nine) my best friend was a kid named Mike. Mike’s parents, Karen and Ron, both had spina bifida. They were adults with lives. They took a bit longer to get places sometimes because they had problems walking. Ron was on crutches and Karen was supposed to be but she only used them when she went to see her doctor. They were both an important part of my formative years.

Of course, the guest poster’s doctor would have prevented them from ever having the lives that would have influenced mine because they weren’t perfect physical specimens. Never mind the things they could have accomplished. Never mind the people they could have inspired. Never mind the fact that my closest childhood friend, himself free of defect, could never have existed. According to that medical staff, they should have been killed before they were born.

I find this whole stance to be offensive. And yes, I know we conservative types don’t like the word “offended” but it’s the only one I can think of to use here. A doctors job is to heal, at least to the extent possible, problems and provide comfort when he can. It’s not to kill off a patient so that his buddy the pediatrician doesn’t have to work as hard. And it’s definitely not to decide that a child is unfit to be born.

That was one of the pillars of the Nazi murder program. People with congenital disabilities were considered to be “life unworthy of life” and subject to “euthanasia” in this case meaning that they were killed by the state. They were gassed and their bodies burned, just like Jewish people were. Per the article I just linked:

Within hours of their arrival at such centers, the victims perished in gas chambers. The gas chambers, disguised as shower facilities, used pure, bottled carbon monoxide gas. T4 functionaries burned the bodies in crematoria attached to the gassing facilities. Other workers took the ashes of cremated victims from a common pile and placed them in urns to send to the relatives of the victims. The families or guardians of the victims received such an urn, along with a death certificate and other documentation, listing a fictive cause and date of death.

The difference being that the Nazis at least had the common sense to hide what they were doing, where the American health care system is brazen enough to openly kill the unborn:

Because the program was secret, T-4 planners and functionaries took elaborate measures to conceal its deadly designs. Even though physicians and institutional administrators falsified official records in every case to indicate that the victims died of natural causes, the "euthanasia" program quickly became an open secret. There was widespread public knowledge of the measure. Private and public protests concerning the killings took place, especially from members of the German clergy. Among these clergy was the bishop of Münster, Clemens August Count von Galen. He  protested the T-4 killings in a sermon August 3, 1941. In light of the widespread public knowledge and the public and private protests, Hitler ordered a halt to the Euthanasia Program in late August 1941.

According to T4's own internal calculations, the "euthanasia" effort claimed the lives of 70,273 institutionalized mentally and physically disabled persons at the six gassing facilities between January 1940 and August 1941.

Of course, that didn’t stop Nazis from killing disabled people, they just found a way to continue to do it behind the scenes. It’s about what I would expect from a totalitarian government. The takeaway from this, however, is that, unlike the country that literally committed the Holocaust, we don’t need to hide what’s going on in the twenty-first century United States. Doctors can openly advocate for the termination of life unworthy of life in their own offices and no one says a word.

It’s time to let the names of these doctors be known. It’s time to urge people to stop using doctors whose idea of treating a birth defect is to kill the patient. It’s time to spread awareness among the general public that America’s ob-gyns are discriminating against the disabled. And yes, murder due to a medical condition is discrimination.

The US needs to avoid becoming Nazi Germany. We don’t want to be the United Kingdom with its decision that dying was in the best interests of twenty-eight month old Alfie Evans. We need to do whatever we can as individuals to put physicians who push death as a treatment out of business. It needs to start now.