With the first patient recently killed under Wash­ing­ton State’s new right-to-die law, For The Record takes time to review the inci­sive mate­r­ial pre­sented by author Wes­ley J. Smith and pre­sented in these 1998 inter­views, recorded in Novem­ber and Decem­ber of that year, respectively.

As the econ­omy con­tin­ues to floun­der and with exor­bi­tant cost of health insur­ance at the epi­cen­ter of Amer­i­can civic  debate, peo­ple should not be dis­mis­sive of the notion that the solu­tion to the prob­lem of the unin­sured tak­ing the turn it did in Nazi Ger­many. In that con­text, we musn’t lose sight of the fact that the eugen­ics laws which were the foun­da­tion  of Nazi exter­mi­na­tion grew directly out of main­stream West­ern and U.S. eugen­ics think­ing and  leg­is­la­tion. it is not some­thing alien to our culture.

The co-author (with Ralph Nader) of sev­eral books about con­sumer advo­cacy, Wes­ley J. Smith has writ­ten Forced Exit: The Slip­pery Slope From Assisted Sui­cide to Legal­ized Mur­der (Times Books, copy­right 1997), a vol­ume that Mr. Emory believes is one of the most impor­tant books ever written.

FTR #117 broad­cast presents an overview of Mr. Smith’s book. Begin­ning with the “work” of the late ser­ial killer Dr. Jack Kevorkian, the inter­view high­lights the fun­da­men­tal changes in med­ical the­ory and prac­tice that are lead­ing Amer­ica down a path dis­turbingly sim­i­lar (in cer­tain respects) to the path Ger­many fol­lowed in the 1930s. (Dur­ing that period, Ger­many adopted the T-4 euthana­sia pro­gram which mur­dered “dis­pos­able” per­sons in cold blood.)

Med­ical ethics in this coun­try are already evolv­ing in a man­ner not unlike that in Ger­many, in which the physician’s pri­mary respon­si­bil­ity was seen as to soci­ety rather than to the patient. The pro­gram dis­cusses other chill­ing changes in med­ical prac­tice includ­ing the enabling of death by dehy­dra­tion of peo­ple with cog­ni­tive dis­abil­i­ties, a par­tic­u­larly bru­tal form of ter­mi­na­tion. In addi­tion, the broad­cast exposes the fal­lacy that “guide­lines” will pre­vent abuse, cit­ing (among other prece­dents) the fail­ure of those guide­lines in the Nether­lands, which allows euthanasia.

Other points of analy­sis in FTR #117 include: the fun­da­men­tal change that for-profit HMOs have wrought in Amer­i­can med­i­cine and how those changes affect the issue of euthana­sia; the inabil­ity of most Amer­i­can med­ical per­son­nel to accu­rately diag­nose both per­ma­nent brain dam­age and depres­sion in patients and that failure’s impli­ca­tions for the issue of euthana­sia; how euthana­sia can be used as a vehi­cle of social oppres­sion and how the hos­pice move­ment, pal­lia­tive care and inde­pen­dent liv­ing move­ment for dis­abled peo­ple, can alle­vi­ate the prob­lems that euthana­sia advo­cates say only death can solve.

Recorded a lit­tle less than a month after #117, FTR #124 picks up where the ear­lier broad­cast left off. In addi­tion to review­ing mate­r­ial from FTR-117, the broad­cast sets forth addi­tional mate­r­ial from Smith’s book.

Par­tic­u­lar empha­sis is on Peter Singer, a bio-ethicist recently appointed to the fac­ulty of Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity. A cham­pion of the “Right to Die Move­ment,” Singer’s views have been com­pared with those of social philoso­phers whose work paved the way for the Third Reich’s “Aktion T-4″ euthana­sia program.

One of the main texts affect­ing the Ger­man euthana­sia move­ment was Bind­ing and Hoche’s On the Destruc­tion of Life Unwor­thy of Life. In Forced Exit, Smith com­pares the text of a legal deci­sion by Judge Stephen Rein­hardt with key pas­sages from the Bind­ing and Hoche text, a major influ­ence on Hitler’s social philosophy.

Other high­lights of FTR #124 include: review of analy­sis of the dif­fi­culty physi­cians have in diag­nos­ing and treat­ing depres­sion (many “can­di­dates” for euthana­sia are clin­i­cally depressed and, there­fore, treat­able); the dif­fi­culty physi­cians have in accu­rately diag­nos­ing ‘per­sis­tent veg­e­ta­tive states” (many so-called “brain-dead” patients are mis­di­ag­nosed and, in some cases, con­scious but unable to com­mu­ni­cate); and review of the eco­nomic imper­a­tives being imposed on physi­cians by for-profit HMOs.