Assisted suicide has historical links to eugenics movements and was used to target people deemed a drag on resources and no longer useful to society, an anti-euthanasia campaigner has said.
The CEO of Humanists Against Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia, who is also emeritus professor of history from the University of Sunderland, cited early proponents of euthanasia such as Samuel Williams who presented the idea to the Birmingham Speculative Club in 1870.
Mr. Yuill told host Lee Hall: “He made the point that people are suffering unnecessarily, but they’re no longer good to anybody else. So it’s always had this twin idea of compassion, but also utility.”
‘Negative Eugenics’
In Germany in the 1920s—long before the euthanasia programmes of the Third Reich—the argument evolved to include discussions of cost.The professor cited a pamphlet that talked about the termination of lives deemed useless “and it was basically saying that people in mental hospitals take up a lot resources.” Various groups were also particularly keen on the idea of the “black stork,” which “is to get rid of infants who were destined to be disabled.”
“It was called negative eugenics. It was very much connected with the whole idea of eugenics,” the emeritus professor said, adding that it targeted “the people who are a drag on resources.”
This idea persists among the current pro-euthanasia movement, Mr. Yuill said, referencing the recent opinion piece in The Times by Matthew Parris where he suggested the UK needed assisted suicide because old age and infirmity are too expensive.
“There’s always been that utility behind it. It’s only now that it’s sort of coming out,” Mr. Yuill said, citing a Canadian parliamentary budget office report from 2020 which calculated the government had saved $86.9 million by implementing its Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) programme.
“Basically, it came out to around $16,000 per person, under the existing situation. If you include people with mental health difficulties, it goes up to $54,000 per person,” he said.
Propagandising for the Euthanasia Movement
“So there are real savings to be made,” Mr. Yuill said. “But they want to keep this quiet because, of course, whilst you are campaigning for people to support this act, you have to keep quiet about the utility argument.“People tend to get upset when they think that you are wanting to eradicate their relatives—or even themselves—because they’re a drag on the economy.”
The effort to disguise the true “utility” intent of the euthanasia movement was also demonstrated during the Third Reich, the history professor said.
He described one campaign, which showed weighing scales with a family of five on one side and a mentally ill person on the other, “making the point that the money it takes keeping this mentally ill person alive could feed a family of five. And this would, of course, help the State as they were very keen to do that.”
The campaign failed because—coupled with the opposition from Catholic Bishop von Galen—it had explicitly put forward the “utility” argument. However, the actual programme of euthanising the mentally ill and others deemed a drain on resources continued.
The next propaganda project on euthanasia saw the Nazi regime’s chief propagandist Joseph Goebbels “remove the utility idea” and play on the notion of compassion in a film that was sympathetic to a husband killing his terminally ill wife.
Assisted Dying: the ‘Orwellian Marketing Term’
Mr. Yuill also believes pro-euthanasia campaigners use language to obfuscate what laws and proposed legislation on assisted suicide really mean.He explained that he uses the term “assisted suicide” rather than “assisted dying,” which he branded an “Orwellian” and “marketing term.”
“There are various different facets of this question which confuse people. A lot of people talk about assisted dying. And I think that is a fairly Orwellian and marketing term. I don’t use it and I criticise people for using it because I think it masks what’s really happening.
“What is really proposed in this country is assisted suicide, whereby the person ingests deadly drugs in order to kill themselves. What is euthanasia? Euthanasia is when the doctor delivers the deadly drugs through a lethal injection. I think it’s very necessary for us to be honest in how this is debated—right from the very start—in order to have any kind of perspective on the issue.”
He added: “If we had honest debate in the country, then I think people will actually realise what is being discussed. That’s one of the problems I have with the language is that it’s preventing people from thinking deeply about what is really happening. And that is Orwellian in a terrible sense.”
From Being for the Terminally Ill to the Mentally Ill
Mr. Yuill is optimistic that any legislation in the British Isles on euthanasia or assisted suicide would be defeated, as understanding of what it entails grows among the public. However, he warned that if it is introduced, it will be unlikely to stay limited to within the narrow scope of its intention: for the terminally ill with less than six months to live.He said that other countries like Belgium, The Netherlands, and Canada, all started their euthanasia campaigns with those restrictions in place, only for the scope to widen.
“In Canada, it was legalised in 2016 for people whose death was, quote, ’reasonably foreseeable.‘ By 2020, they removed that from the legislation—that phrase, ’reasonably foreseeable’—to allow it for people who had ‘conditions’ as well as terminal illnesses.
“And now they are determined to put through euthanasia on the basis of mental health suffering, which is what is legal in the Netherlands,” Mr. Yuill explained.
“We will go down that track if we legalise assisted suicide in this country. There is no question,” he warned.
