“For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother's womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” Psalm 139:13-16
I was told this:
When the nurse saw my first little sister emerge, she blurted,"Oh my God! What’s wrong with it?” The doctor ordered her to “get the hell of here.” Which she did, but the damage was done. My mother became hysterical at hearing this, but by then the second twin was already born. The first child died quickly. Once disconnected from my mother, Lisa didn’t have enough brain to sustain even a breath. Leila lived. Her limbs were twisted, one leg so much so it had to be broken and set into a cast so that it might heal normally. She did respond to sound and light. She could eat but would often choke. An x-ray later showed she had very little brain. She would never walk, talk or play. Every swallow could be deadly, and a runny nose could drown her.
I was heartbroken as much as a 5 year-old can be. I had thought I was going to have a little brother or sister. A friend, someone to play with, and I was to be protector. I was excited for Christmases and Birthdays to come. For a little while, my mother pretended. She had portrait photos made with little Leila posed and dressed fine with a little bow in her thin hair.
But taking care of Leila was beyond my mother’s abilities. Leila was sent to a state institution in Porterville, California. I visited her once, but became so emotional and upset that I was never allowed to go again. That was wrong, I should have been exposed to the grief. Leila died of pneumonia in 1974, only four short years of life, such as it was.
Was her’s a life unworthy of life? My mother later said that it would have been a mercy if she knew enough to have aborted the twins. But a mercy for whom?
Thirty-two years earlier a child was born to Richard and Lina Kretschmar near Leipzig, Germany. Little Gerhard Herbert Kretschmar (20 February 1939 – 25 July 1939) was blind, without a leg and part of an arm and judged an “idiot” by doctors. Horrified, the father wanted the child killed, but was refused by a local doctor, murder still being frowned upon by the law. The parents, ardent Nazis, appealed directly to Adolf Hitler who always took a keen interest in ridding the Reich of the useless. Hitler ordered one of his personal physicians, Karl Brandt, to investigate and to murder the child if the father’s claim was true. Hitler assured Brandt that no court would accuse him of a crime.
Brandt did his duty and little Gerhard was killed, likely with an injection of phenol. But the incident lit a fire in Hitler’s mind: keeping the useless alive was expensive and those deformed, retarded, crazy or diseased children were filling hospital space that would soon be needed to house Germany’s wounded and crippled soldiers. In fact, not just children, but adults too, and the elderly with problems that burdened the state. Only three weeks after Gerhard was killed, the Nazi effort to rid itself of “Life unworthy of life” began with the nationwide registration of burdensome incurables.
Six main killing centers were established and most were quickly supplied with carbon monoxide gas chambers. One of these killing centers earned an especially grisly reputation: Schloss Hartheim.
Like many Austrian “castles,” Schloss Hartheim looks more like a palatial residence fit for one of the Habsburg’s minor nobles who dotted the landscape with such places. But it isn’t. Its pleasant outside appearance cannot hide the horrors that occurred there. At Schloss Hartheim, the Nazis murdered all sorts of undesirables besides children: crippled adults, the psychotic, mentally retarded people as well as well as Jews, political prisoners and troublesome clergy. A document from 1944 stated: "disinfecting 70,273 people with a life expectation of 10 years" had saved food in the value of 141,775,573.80 Reichsmarks.”
The Nazis learned much from Hartheim and the others; killing in mass, learning subterfuges and applying scientific methods of efficiency. These killing centers were the prototypes of the genocidal machine to come. Indeed, had they not been established, the Holocaust would have been severely delayed, fewer people would have died by the war’s end.
The children were usually killed by an injection, although some were killed in the gas chamber on the ground floor. The parents of those children, who were told their kids were going to cared for, were sent letters stating that their child had died of pneumonia. There was a lot of “pneumonia” going around then.
Of the many Holocaust sites I have visited, Schloss Hartheim (and the program that empowered it, Aktion T4) are particularly repugnant to me. Aktion T4 meant to rid Germany of lebensunwertes Leben (Life unworthy of life) and did so with cold reason.
Within confines of cold reason, then, we can concede that my sister, Leila, would have been a burden to the State of California had she lived beyond her four years. She required special feeding and almost 24-hour care. She was expensive. And what about us, the family? Of course we would have suffered also, watching the child grow into an adult with no hope she would ever know us. Why shouldn’t there be some merciful way to allow children like Leila to depart this world and free resources better used elsewhere? There is a way, yes, in the womb. Children with Down’s Syndrome are nearly extinct in some countries. In these United States, 80 to 90 percent of Down’s Syndrome children are aborted.
But once born, why should they live, burden that they are? Why should the families have to endure the grief of caring for the hopeless, the vegetables, and terminally ill?
We endure because we (still a majority of us anyway) understand that life, in all its forms, is ours to protect, whatever the burden and whatever our suffering. Who decides what innocent is unworthy of the life endowed it by the Creator? Once the killing starts, as we have seen Canada and Europe, it doesn’t stop, but instead extends its shadow as a “mercy.”
Last week scientists announced they found proof that Neanderthals in Spain had cared for a child with Down’s Syndrome until she was six-years old. She was likely deaf or nearly so, and her care would have required far more effort than her mother alone could provide: the whole tribe must have contributed. I would guess that the family and tribe was heartbroken when that child died, likely from the many complications of her condition. The child died 146,000 years ago.
Love is older, and wiser, than murder.
Now I understand your title.
I didn't know that about the trajectory of the Nazis. As I was reading, I thought, "this sounds not all that different from what has started to happen in Canada. . . " so you are bang on. In 2022 (and numbers have increased since then), Canada had over 13,000 cases of MAID (Medical assistance in dying), a 32% increase from 2021. Canada has about the same population of California. In the same time period in California, there were 853 medically assisted deaths. What does that say about the process here. . . . ?