On December 5th, 2014, Dan Becker was asked by the Leadership Institute International to address a gathering of international pro-life leaders outside the Hague in Hilversum, Netherlands. He presented a logical and compelling historical analogy. He spoke about the German village of Hadamar–the original site of the killing that culminated in the The Holocaust. After WWI, Germany was suffering economic hardships. The public policy discussion in Hadamar started deciding who was “deserving” of receiving healthcare rations. Those non-persons considered a drain on the economy were labeled “useless eaters” and “human ballast” and therefore expendable. The first among their victims were children with disabilities–children with Down’s Syndrome or schizophrenia. Up to 70 children every other day were put on buses, backed up to a carbon monoxide chamber, and gassed to death. Before long mental patients were dispatched in like manner. As with any slippery slope, the classes of human life who were deemed an unwanted expense by society expanded to include the elderly, the infirmed, half-breeds, and eventually Jews and gypsies. The technology of mass killing ending in The Holocaust.
The parallel between the public policy debates of the last century and today’s public discussion of who should receive care under the new ObamaCare . . . are chilling. Consider the recent admission by Peter Singer, a prominent proponent of ObamaCare, in which Personhood should be denied to those who do not meet a certain set of criteria–those with Alzheimer’s, dementia, a mis-diagnosed persistent vegetative state, pre-born children with fetal anomalies, and yes, even healthy born infants who are unwanted by their parents. By excluding these classes from his protected class of Persons, he, like his predecessors in Germany, is setting the stage for the new Holocaust of our time.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” –George Santayana