Warning about current backslide of today's medical profession into dark days of Germany's euthanasia programme
By Hilary White
HULL, UK, April 9, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - In Hitler's Germany, long before 1939, vulnerable patients in nursing homes, insane asylums and orphanages were being killed by medical practitioners, including nurses, in the Nazi eugenics programme Aktion T4 that some estimate killed as many as 200,000 to 250,000 people. Next week, Linda Shields, a professor of nursing at Hull University in Yorkshire, will give a speech on the issue.
Professor Shields will speak at the Royal College of Nursing's Annual Research conference on the implications today of the nursing profession's participation in the T4 programme.
"Nursing can't move on as a profession unless it addresses its black side," she has said.
Professor Shields is a member of the College of Experts at the Medical Research Council (UK), and chairman of the International Collaboration on the Role of Nursing in the Third Reich. Her interests also include the study of nurses who worked in the slave labour camps of Nazi Germany.
Shields told the Guardian, "I've seen horrified faces and some people crying when I've looked down from the stage at other conferences. And I've had one or two come up to me afterwards saying that we're damaging the image of nursing by raking over these issues."
Shields did not hesitate to address the current backslide of today's medical profession into those dark days of Germany's euthanasia programme. "People tend to think that these things can't happen again. But in America, nurses are helping with lethal injections for executions. And science has moved forward to the point where we're on the cusp of parents being able to choose to have a blonde haired, blue-eyed girl. Or boy for that matter."
Professor Shields, whose medical specialty is paediatric nursing, said, "Are we coming to a point where parents can demand certain requirements and be able to abort foetuses that don't meet those requirements? If so, what should nurses' role be in that scenario? They have to be aware of what went on in the past."
Pro-life researchers have long known that the same philosophical background - utilitarianism - supports the current abortion regime in the medical professions. Many of the founding individuals of the modern abortion movement, most notably Margaret Sanger the founders of Planned Parenthood, are known to have been strongly sympathetic to the Nazi "racial hygiene" programmes.
In the UK, Marie Stopes, a paleobotanist, was an early eugenics campaigner for the same racial theories. Her work promoting eugenics as well as "free sex" and contraception resulted in her founding one of the world's largest abortion organisations, Marie Stopes International.
The problem of nurses participating in abortion has grown in Britain, with some suggesting that nurses not only ought to assist in abortion but ought to be allowed to commit surgical abortions under a doctor's supervision. A year ago, a study conducted by a consultant gynaecologist, Vincent Argent, and Lin Pavey, a nurse and former clinic manager of the British Pregnancy Advice Service, suggested that the Abortion Act and ensuing case law had created a legal environment where nurses could legally commit the act themselves.
In 2006, the UK instituted a policy that allowed nurses to dispense contraceptives to schoolchildren and refer girls for abortions, without parental consent or knowledge, in all primary and secondary schools.
With the growth of passive euthanasia by dehydration, allowed under the UK's Mental Capacity Act, British nurses are also being called upon to assist patients who are being involuntarily dehydrated to death on doctors' orders.
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