By Anthony Barich
THE renewed push for euthanasia to be legalised in Australia shows that the Nazi practice of eugenics is prevalent in society, a senior Australian Bishop said.
The Australian Catholic Bishops Conference have also requested that eugenics be the focus of a major Catholics bioethicists’ colloquium in Melbourne from 23-26 January.
Melbourne Auxiliary Bishop Peter Elliott, the Australian Bishops’ delegate on the Australian Catholic Disability Council who will address the Colloquium, said the focus on eugenics is “urgent” because of “the push for euthanasia and the wider use of abortion”.
He told the closing Mass of the annual Christus Rex Pilgrimage at Sacred Heart Cathedral, Bendigo in October 2010 that the “warped practice of eugenics is rising from its Nazi tomb” in Australia.
He blamed “aggressive secularism” for the renewed push for euthanasia to be legalised and for broader laws allowing abortion.Bishop Elliott then told The Record on 13 January that abortion can also be used for eugenical purposes, and even the practice of sex selection abortion “has a eugenics mentality in it”.
“This was seen recently in Victoria when an IVF couple aborted twin boys, not because they were twins but because they were male,” he said.
“But the more obvious example of eugenic abortion is the seek and destroy approach to Down syndrome babies. The new technologies that reveal life in the womb are misused to eliminate these ‘imperfect’ human beings.”
The practice of euthanasia has eugenics within it, he added, in the sense that some people are “deemed unfit to remain on the planet because of health condition, disability or even merely their age”.
Bishop Elliott said infanticide for eugenical purposes has also been publicly defended by controversial Australian philosopher Peter Singer, Ira W DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University in New Jersey.
Attempts to legalise euthanasia have been defeated in Western Australia, South Australia and Tasmania in the past six months, but there are renewed attempts to pressure the Federal Government to repeal its ban on the Northern Territory’s euthanasia laws passed in 1996. Abortion is legal in every State and Territory in Australia.
In planning the Colloquium, the Australian Association of Catholic Bioethicists (AACB) noted that “eugenics is widespread practice in Australia”, as approximately 90 per cent of children who are diagnosed with disabilities in utero are aborted.
“These Colloquium proceedings come at an important time for Catholic bioethicists, health professionals, parliamentarians and members of the legal profession to be aware of the Church’s teachings on the inherent dignity of the human person and the sanctity of human life, from conception to a natural death,” the AACB said on its website. “There is also a practice of sedation and demanding feeding, in other words, starvation, for those who survive to be born with a disability and whose parents do not wish them to survive.”
The Colloquium will also consider eugenics at the end of life in relation to the advocacy for euthanasia to be available for people who are in pain or experiencing “existential suffering”, which refers to loneliness and depression.
Catholic Women’s League member and health care ethicist Jo Grainger will present a paper at the Colloquium on 26 January titled ‘Nursing and assisted suicide – the international experience.’
The Colloquium proceedings are open for health professionals, academics and legal professionals. The general public are invited to the opening public forum and Colloquium dinner.
Full programme and registration can be found on the Colloquium website www.bioethicscolloquium.com.au or call Monica O’Shea on (03) 9412 3377.