The Eurasia Review Reports: Russian Call For ‘Postnatal Abortion’ Sparks Outrage
Tuesday, February 09, 2010
By Claire Bigg, Lyubov Chizhova, Aleksandr Kulygin
In late December, Snezhana Mitina received a tearful phone call from her friend Svetlana. Sobbing, Svetlana explained she had just read a newspaper article calling for babies with mental disabilities to be killed at birth.
The author, Aleksandr Nikonov, used the word “debil” — a deeply offensive term in Russian — to characterize such children. He argued that parents should have the right to euthanize newborns diagnosed with mental retardation and other developmental disabilities.
The article, which ran under the headline “Finish Them Off, So They Don’t Suffer,” went on to describe what Nikonov termed “postnatal abortion” as an act of mercy.
Mitina and her friend, Svetlana Shtarkova — both mothers of children with developmental disabilities — decided to take action. They filed a complaint with the Russian Union of Journalists against Nikonov, a correspondent for the popular tabloid “Speed-Info.”
The two women say their aim is not to punish Nikonov but to raise the alarm about Russia’s culture of intolerance toward disabled people. Shtarkova made an emotional appeal at a hearing last week at the journalists’ union.
“The opinion expressed by the author is not unique; statistics show that one-fourth of Russians share similar views,” Shtarkova told the February 2 hearing. “Complete strangers come up to me in the street and tell me that I’m depraved and deserve my fate. Doctors and social workers refuse to do their jobs, just because my child is severely disabled.”
The lawyer representing the two mothers, Pyotr Kucherenko, told the board that Nikonov’s proposal to put “flawed” babies to death only fueled discrimination and was dangerously reminiscent of the theories of racial superiority upheld by Nazi Germany.
Nikonov, however, was unrepentant.
“Let me introduce myself: I am Adolf Hitler. This is the way people want to portray me,” Nikonov says. “But the real bastards are those who tell me, ‘Yes, it is good and fair that people are in pain. We’ll look on and say people can suffer, as long as our scholarly conception of humaneness is not affected.’ To hell with you. People shouldn’t suffer. This is my opinion, and you won’t shut me up.”
A tabloid journalist in Russia calls for babies with mental retardation or other developmental disabilities to be euthanized, highlighting widespread prejudice against the disabled in Russia. The cas…
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EUGENICS IN THE USA?
In the 1970’s President Obama’s Science Czar, Paul Holdren, published many books, several which were co-authored with radical population control guru, Paul Ehrlich. Holdren stated officially that one of his mentors was a Professor he had by the name of Paul Harrison.
Paul Holdren, President Obama’s Science Czar praised his mentor, Harrison Brown, who wrote the book: The Challenge of Man’s Future.
Challenge of Mans Future by Harrison Brown
In a speech he delivered as President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Holdren admitted that he admired Brown and read his book in high school. Holdren also admitted in his speech that he later worked with Harrison Brown at Caltech.
Holdren quoted Brown as saying this during that same speech, “It is clear that the future course of history will be determined by the rates at which people breed and die, by the rapidity with which nonrenewable resources are consumed, by the extent and speed with which agricultural production can be improved, by the rate at which the under-developed areas can industrialize, by the rapidity with which we are able to develop new resources, as well as by the extent to which we succeed in avoiding future wars. All of these factors are interlocked. ”
Holdren asked this question in an article authored by him, which was published in a book entitled, No Growth Society,
” Why, then, should we compound our plight by permitting population growth to continue?” He stated clearly that in the 1970’s the US had already exceeded its “optimum population size of 210 million” (pg. 41) and concluded that , ” it should be obvious that the optimum rate of population growth is zero or negative…“
Paul Holdren and Harrison Brown slide
What is also interesting is that I obtained a copy of Harrison Brown’s book, The Challenge of Man’s Future, the one our Science Czar holds up as so important, and discovered this Nazi style statement by Brown on page 87 . ” In the absence of restraint abortion, sterilization, coitus interruptus, or artificial fertility control, the resultant high birth rate would have to be matched at equilibrium by an equally high death rate. A major contribution to the high death rate could be infanticide, as has been the situation in cultures of the past. ”
Are these the people we want in charge of our health care?
For more on Eugenics and how it is used to exterminate entire people groups today go here: http://www.maafa21.com
Note the documentation to “Sterilants in the Water Supply”
In the 1970s, as the leading theoretician of animal rights, Peter Singer, Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and Philosophy coined the term “speciesism” for anyone so narrow-minded as to, “allow the interest of his species to override the greater interest of members of other species“. Singer holds that the right to physical integrity is grounded in a being’s ability to suffer, and the right to life is grounded in the ability to plan and anticipate one’s future. Since the unborn, infants, and severely disabled people lack the ability to plan and anticipate their future, he states that abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia can be justified in certain special circumstances, for instance in the case of severely disabled infants whose life would cause suffering both to themselves and to their parents.
In a question posed to Singer, it was asked:
“If you had to save either a human being or a mouse from a fire, with no time to save them both, wouldn’t you save the human being?”
Singer’s answer, ” Yes, in almost all cases I would save the human being. But not because the human being is human, that is, a member of the species Homo sapiens. Species membership alone isn’t morally significant, but equal consideration for similar interests allows different consideration for different interests. The qualities that are ethically significant are, firstly, a capacity to experience something — that is, a capacity to feel pain, or to have any kind of feelings. That’s really basic, and it’s something that a mouse shares with us. But when it comes to a question of taking life, or allowing life to end, it matters whether a being is the kind of being who can see that he or she actually has a life — that is, can see that he or she is the same being who exists now, who existed in the past, and who will exist in the future. Such a being has more to lose than a being incapable of understand this. Any normal human being past infancy will have such a sense of existing over time. I’m not sure that mice do, and if they do, their time frame is probably much more limited. So normally, the death of a human being is a greater loss to the human than the death of a mouse is to the mouse – for the human, it cuts off plans for the distant future, for example, but not in the case of the mouse. And we can add to that the greater extent of grief and distress that, in most cases, the family of the human being will experience, as compared with the family of the mouse (although we should not forget that animals, especially mammals and birds, can have close ties to their offspring and mates). That’s why, in general, it would be right to save the human, and not the mouse, from the burning building, if one could not save both. But this depends on the qualities and characteristics that the human being has. If, for example, the human being had suffered brain damage so severe as to be in an irreversible state of unconsciousness, then it might not be better to save the human”
Singer states here that, ” The difference between killing disabled and normal infants lies not in any supposed right to life that the latter has and the former lacks, but in other considerations about killing. Most obviously there is the difference that often exists in the attitudes of the parents. The birth of a child is usually a happy event for the parents. They have, nowadays, often planned for the child. The mother has carried it for nine months. From birth, a natural affection begins to bind the parents to it. So one important reason why it is normally a terrible thing to kill an infant is the effect the killing will have on its parents.
It is different when the infant is born with a serious disability. Birth abnormalities vary, of course. Some are trivial and have little effect on the child or its parents; but others turn the normally joyful event of birth into a threat to the happiness of the parents, and any other children they may have.
Parents may, with good reason, regret that a disabled child was ever born. In that event the effect that the death of the child will have on its parents can be a reason for, rather than against killing it.
When asked the question: Would you kill a disabled baby?
Singer Replied, “Yes, if that was in the best interests of the baby and of the family as a whole. Many people find this shocking, yet they support a woman’s right to have an abortion. One point on which I agree with opponents of abortion is that, from the point of view of ethics rather than the law, there is no sharp distinction between the fetus and the newborn baby.”
With Professors like Singer, Harrison and others teaching our kids at major Universities – do you really believe that National Health Care will not go down the slippery slope to Death Panels and Euthanasia? Just Sayn !
Former Labor Secretary and Obama adviser Robert Reich speaking at UC Berkeley on Sept. 26, 2007
“Thank you so much for coming this afternoon. I’m so glad to see you, and I would like to be president. Let me tell you a few things on health care. Look, we have the only health-care system in the world that is designed to avoid sick people. [laughter] That’s true, and what I’m going to do is I am going to try to reorganize it to be more amenable to treating sick people. But that means you–particularly you young people, particularly you young, healthy people–you’re going to have to pay more. [applause] Thank you.
“And by the way, we are going to have to–if you’re very old, we’re not going to give you all that technology and all those drugs for the last couple of years of your life to keep you maybe going for another couple of months. It’s too expensive, so we’re going to let you die. [applause]
“Also, I’m going to use the bargaining leverage of the federal government in terms of Medicare, Medicaid–we already have a lot of bargaining leverage–to force drug companies and insurance companies and medical suppliers to reduce their costs. But that means less innovation, and that means less new products and less new drugs on the market, which means you are probably not going to live that much longer than your parents. [applause] Thank you.”
Also Read: Death Panels? Is it possible?
READ MORE HERE: Death Panels, Eugenics, Rationing, Quality adjusted life ? what does Uncle Sam think your Life Value is?
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