Killing mental patients isn’t new

Belgium and Holland lead the way in euthanasia, but many other countries, including our own, are in hot pursuit.

To stay out in front, Benelux has to keep setting new records, and it fell on Belgium to answer the clarion call of modernity.

In that spirit, a physically healthy 23-year-old woman was euthanised in May as a way of treating her depression.

In 2016 Shanti De Corte witnessed a murderous Islamic attack at Brussels Airport. As a result, she developed PTSD and depression, which she has since been unable to overcome.

Those Muslim terrorists didn’t kill her, but Belgian doctors did. It was all perfectly legal, for Belgian law allows euthanasia in cases of “unbearable physical or mental pain that cannot be alleviated”.

The law has ruled, so there’s nothing anyone can say against it. Roman Law is in force in Belgium, and didn’t Roman jurists say dura lex, sed lex (“the law is harsh, but it is the law”)? So that’s it then.

Not quite. For, harsh or soft, a law must above all be just. And one has to acknowledge with sadness that not all laws satisfy this requirement.

Doctors in Nazi Germany, for example, functioned according to elaborate laws drafted by celebrated medico-legal experts. However, Nuremberg Tribunals judged that their compliance with those laws had led them to break other laws, which ought to have taken precedence.

Among other things, Nazi laws encouraged doctors to euthanise mental patients, some similar to Miss De Corte. And the medics set about that task with alacrity. About 300,000 psychiatric patients were killed by lethal injection, gas, sedative overdose or forced starvation.

You might say that the implied parallel with today’s Belgian doctors is spurious. After all, the euthanasia they performed on Miss De Corte was voluntary, while their Nazi precursors neither asked their patients’ permission nor waited for their requests.

Yet this argument is weak even on its own terms. One could object that the wishes of a schizophrenic or, in this case, a severely depressed young woman ought to be taken with a bag, not just a grain, of salt.

In any number of legal situations, the testimony of such a patient would be regarded as inadmissible. Yet when the same patient says she wants to die, the law holds that wish to be unimpeachable.

However, the issues at stake are larger than legislative inconsistencies and lapses in logic. For they bring into focus the role of the medical profession in general and individual doctors in particular.

What kind of doctor would happily kill a patient? One corrupted into institutional hubris, is the answer to that.

In fact, one of the few valid arguments against the death penalty is its corrupting effect on the executioner. This though most executioners could claim a legal justification for their actions.

Hence the argument against judicial killing: it’s not a function of the law to produce monsters for whom killing is all in a day’s work. If it does, there must be something wrong with the law.

I don’t necessarily agree with this argument. But I nonetheless consider it valid, and some of the personalities involved support it well.

For example, Charles-Henri Sanson (d. 1806), who pioneered the use of the guillotine, executed a total of 2,918 people, including the royal family and many of his own friends. However, he was a babe in the woods compared to the chief NKVD executioner Vasily Blokhin (d. 1955).

Gen. Blokhin personally shot tens of thousands, including 7,000 Poles at Katyn in less than a month. Vasily, he of the leather apron fame, took his job seriously. Thus he carried to Katyn his personal stash of German Walther pistols, dismissing the home-made TT for two reasons.

First, the TT overheated when used on that scale. More important, German rounds found in those Polish crania enabled the Soviets to lie for the next 50 years that the Nazis had been responsible for the killings.

Whatever you may think of such executioners and the laws empowering them, at least judicial killing was their job description. A doctor’s job is different, and he takes an oath to that effect.

Having consulted the text of the Hippocratic Oath, I found no mention of the God-like power of life and death it confers on doctors. But then its original texts go back to the times when God-like powers were reserved for, well, God.

Faith in the immortality of the soul put the mediator of God’s will, the priest, at the centre of the moral, and therefore legal, ethos. It stands to reason that, when the ethos changed, the priest was marginalised.

The soul was repudiated as nonexistent, and the emergent materialistic man elevated his body to the now vacant perch. His body became his religion, with the doctor its priest.

Or even more than that. Unlike a priest, a doctor isn’t just a mediator between man and a higher authority. When it comes to life and death, the doctor himself is that higher authority for none higher exists.

This isn’t to say that, until modernity got really toxic, doctors couldn’t decide who lived and who died. It’s part of their remit to make a therapeutic decision to withdraw treatment they know would be futile, and it’s hard to argue against this on any moral grounds.

Moreover, when a dying patient is in agonising pain requiring sedation with opiates, the line between an effective dose and a lethal one is often smudged. Thus doctors have always administered doses that they knew could potentially kill the patient.

But a moral chasm separates ‘could potentially’ and ‘would definitely’. A doctor putting a risky amount of drug into a writhing patient’s IV is a million moral miles away from one whose sole intention is to kill the patient.

There is no need to legislate for euthanasia to cover the cases of doctors withdrawing treatment or administering a borderline dose of opiates. Moreover, there is a need not to: such laws would make it harder for doctors to do their jobs.

Conversely, euthanasia laws turn doctors into executioners at their patients’ beck and call. This is a relationship similar to that Sanson had with Robespierre, Blokhin with Beria or, closer to my subject, Drs Brandt and Mengele with Hitler.

Granted, there still exists a vast distance separating the Belgian doctors who killed Shanti De Corte from the German doctors who killed hundreds of thousands of mental patients. But if history teaches anything, such distances can be covered fast.

Just look at the evolution of abortion laws, which started out as treating it as an operation only performed in exceptional cases and ended up as a fulfilment of a basic human right. The slippery slope theory doesn’t always work, but it does usually.

If euthanasia is made legal, sooner or later it’ll be made mandatory – it’s impossible to draft the law in such a way that the slippery slope would be off limits. Euthanasia on demand will join abortion on demand in the medical repertoire.

One is tempted to believe that our ancestors were on to something. Human life was sacrosanct to them, and not just man’s exclusive property to dispose of as he saw fit. But that was before progress really got going.