Peter Breggin, psychiatrist, author and founder of the Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology in Bethesda, Maryland, said that “medical murder†found support at the highest levels of Canadian and American psychiatry. He points to examples like influential psychiatrist Foster Kennedy, who at the 1941 annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association called for the extermination of retarded children over the age of five.
Breggin said Kennedy’s goal was to relieve the “utterly unfit†and “nature’s mistakes†of the “agony of living†and to save their parents and the state the cost of caring for them.
Source:
http://www.freedommag.org/english/canada/reports/page01.htm
On January 17, 1938, the New York Times reported the official formation of the Euthanasia Society of America. Within a year, the organization was ready to offer a proposal that would legalize “the termination of human life by painless means for the purpose of avoiding unnecessary suffering.” According to Charles Nixdorff, the society’s treasurer, the measure was limited to voluntary euthanasia because public opinion was not yet ready to accept a broad scope encompassing infants and incompetents. However, the article noted that the society “hoped eventually to legalize the putting to death of non-volunteers beyond the help of medical science."(23) Dr. Foster Kennedy, the euthanasia society’s president declared that euthanasia was “needed mainly for defectives.” He urged the “legalizing of euthanasia primarily in cases of born defectives who are doomed to remain defective, rather than for normal persons who have become miserable through incurable illness.”
In a 1941 poll of twenty-five thousand New York State doctors, conducted by the Euthanasia Society, 27 percent of respondents favored euthanasia for severely disabled children. The poll did not differentiate between newborn and older children.
The following year, Dr. Kennedy came up with a plan for child euthanasia. In an American Journal of Psychiatry article, he wrote: “I believe when the defective child shall have reached the age of five years — and on the application of his guardians — that the case should be considered under law by a competent medical board…” If careful board examination determined that the child was considered to have “no future or hope of one,” he continued, “then I believe it is a merciful and kindly thing to relieve that defective — often tortured and convulsed, grotesque and absurd, useless and foolish, and entirely undesirable — of the agony of living.”
While Kennedy boldly stated the goal of the Euthanasia Society, the organization’s public stance increasingly revolved around the more acceptable concept of voluntary euthanasia for adults.
Just as it is easy to dismiss what is happening in the Netherlands by saying, “We’re not Holland,” it would be simple to describe proposals of the 30s and 40s as aberrations of the past and declare, “That was a long time ago. No one would suggest such a thing today.” But such things indeed are being suggested. The prospect of mercy killing for children entered the realm of “respectable debate” in the 1980s and 1990s.
