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LIFE, DEATH AND RIGHTS
No. 1, August 1994

An occasional news sheet on eugenics and euthanasia, produced by  
Disability Awareness in Action
11 Belgrave Road
London SW1V IRB
United Kingdom
Tel: +44 71 834 0477  Fax: +44 71 821 93'539
Minicom: +44 71 821 9812

Please send copies of any articles you see on these issuses, or a personal  
opinion piece (2-200 words at most).




AUSTRALIA: if granted, a legal right could become a social duty
"Euthanasia for economic reasons is perhaps the most important challenge  
the medical profession will have to face before the end of the century.  
Not in the near future, but now." Dr. Andr� Wynen, Secretary of the World  
Medical Association, quoted in The Age
(Melbourne), 28 February 1994.

HOLLAND
A doctor in the Netherlands has suggested that old people who opt for  
euthanasia should be awarded honours as national heroes because they save  
the state money.

UNITED KINGDOM: organ harvest or daylight robbery?
"According to our view, it seems natural to say that organs of living  
persons are vital health care resources, which, like other vital  
resources, should be subject to a fair distribution. Thus we may be  
committed to hold that elderly persons should be killed in order to  
redistribute their organs to younger critically i11 persons who would soon  
die without the organs. After all, the elderly persons are utilising vital  
resources at the expense of tke needy younger people. Neither fairness nor  
considerations of utiiity seer to speakagainst it. "Klemens Kappel and  
Peter Sandoe,' Saving the Young Before the Old - A Reply to John Harris,  
in Bioethics, vol. 8, No. 1,1994, p.91.

WORLDWIDE: protect older people
"Compulsory euthanasia for the demented elderly, as advocated by some in  
Great Britain and discussed very broadly by the Royal Society of Medicine,  
is presently practised on a small scale in Holland. This practice is  
limiting the life span of people by denying medical help to those above a  
certain age, just as proposed in the United States by a well-known  
governor and a few other people. Any measures to eliminate large numbers  
of citizens from society - voters, life-long taxpayers, living people -  
are incompatible with our present system of government. This does not mean  
that these programmes will not be put into effect. Indeed, some already  
are. But it does mean that the implementation of euthanasia programmes  
will involve an essential change in the system of goveznment now  
prevailing in western nations. Democracy will not protect us against this  
danger. Democracy will disappear. There is no democracy where everybody  
has the right to vote but not everybody has the right to live." Dr.  
Richard Fenigsen, retired Dutch cardiologist, quoted in Population  
Research Institute Review, March/April 1994.

INTERNATIONAL ANTI-EUTHANASIA TASK FORCE
The International Anti-Euthanasia Task Force (IAETF) is a human rights  
group that maintains communication with, an� serves as a consultant for,  
in�ividuais and organisations around the world. Networkers represent a  
broad spectrum of interests, including
disability rights, advocacy, education, religion, law, medicine and  
ethics.
The IAETF was formed in 1987 to meet the urgent need for individuals and  
organisations who oppose euthanasia to work together. It is this common  
ground which unites networkers who may hold widely differing views on  
other aspects of social policy and medical ethics. The aims of the IAETF  
are to:
  - provide complete, accurate and well-documented information on  
euthanasia, suicide, assisted suicide and related issues
  - draw public attention to the subtle and not so subtle pressure placed  
on individuals who are chronically ill, terminally ill, dependent or  
disabled to "get out of the way"
  - promote and defend the right of all to be treated with respect,  
dignity and compassion
  - resist attitudes, programmes and policies that threaten the lives and  
rights of those
who are medically wlnerable.

IAETF, PO Box 760, Steubenville, Ohio 43952, USA.


Thanks to ALERT: Information on Euthanasia, 27 Walpole Street,
London SW3 4Q5, United Kingdom, for the information on this page.


Screen Tests
A screening test used to detect whether mothers have conditions such as  
Down's syndrome and cystic fibrosis can cause missing limbs in babies.  
Fears over the safety of chorionic villus sampling (CVS), which involves  
taking cells from the placenta at an early stage of pregnancy, were first  
raised in 1991.  Dr. Helen Firth of the Oxford Regional Genetic Service  
identified a cluster of babies born with missing limbs to 289 women given  
the test. According to a report in The Lancet (a British magazine for  
doctors), Dr. Firth has analysed all reports of limb defects after CVS,  
published up to December 1992, and found 79 cases.
Thanks to Disability Now, United Kingdom for this information.

Selective Abortion
At the end of May, a British woman had an abortion six months into her  
pregnancy after a hospital scan indicated that her foetus had brain  
damage. The abortion was carried out by Caesarean section; the baby  
survived for 45 minutes. The mother was then told that the foetus did not  
appear to have any impairments. In Britain, most legal abortions must be  
carried out by the 24th week of pregnancy. However, abortion on the  
cgrounds of impairment is legal up to the moment of birth. Most disabled  
people would not blame individual women seeking selective abortions, many  
of whom are struggling with isolation, stigma and poverty as we are.  
Sadly, anotlner important element is ignorance - or disabled people, of  
who we are and what we could do, if the world had not historically been  
organised to exclude, segregate, silence and disable us.  Many people grow  
up without getting to know anyone with severe impairments = at school, at  
work, in leisure time. In the public imagination, we are reduced to one  
characteristic, our impairment, as though other factors (whether we can  
get ajob, get on a bus, enter a polling station, access information) had  
no effect on our "quality of life". Based on this view - that disabled  
people's lives are inevitably full of misery, and a cause of misery to  
others - the "merciful" thing is to "prevent" us. Yet the experience of  
impairment, temporary or permanent, will form part of every lif�. Denying  
this, many doctors, many people, believe that absolutely anything is  
acceptable to avoid the birth or life of a disabled child.  If the British  
woman's baby had had some brain damage, every one of the 45 minutes it  
took, which no medical intervention was made, would have seemedjustified  
and there would have been no news story. None of the media who covered the  
case made this point; it was merely the 'mistake' - a "normal" baby  
allowed to die - that was seen as "tragic".

RESOLUTION BY THE 14TH WORLD CONGRESS OF SOCIAL PSYCHIATRY ON THE DRAFT  
BIOETHICS CONVENTION OF THE COUNCIL OF EUROPE
We, the delegates of the l4th World Congress of Social Psychiatry held in  
Hamburg, Germany from 5 to 10 June 1994, wish to express our deep concern  
about the Bioethics Convention drafted by the Council of Europe.

The Bioethics Convention is designed to govern the application of  
biomedical methode of research and therapy. This concerns, inter alia,  
genetic screening, research into the human genome; methods of genetic  
therapy and embryo research.
Article 6 of the Bioethics Convention provides for national governments to  
authorise "non-beneficial interventions on incapacitated persons" for  
research purposes without personal consent of the individual concerned,  
provided that there is an "overriding interest" and further provided that  
"the risk and burden for the individual is minimal".
This provision will make available to biomedical research any person who  
is impaired by reason of mental illness, mental disability, physical  
illness or disability, advanced age, chronic use of drugs or chronic  
intoxication, to the extent that he lacks or is declared to lack the  
capacity to make or communicate decisions concerning his person. Thus,  
incapacitated persons are in danger of becoming the first victims of the  
unreined ethos of progress of biomedicine and the economic interests  
involved.

We, the delegates of the l4th World Congress of Social Psychiatry, demand  
that no provisions be enacted which, on the grounds of medical or social  
interests, override the human right of the individual or of groups of  
individuals to human integrity and dignity.

We, the delegates of the l4th World Congress of Social Psychiatry wish to  
express our emphatic and urgent warning against the dangers and the  
Babylonian megalomania in biomedicine: not all that could be done, should  
be done.

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