DO WE really have to be the victims of our emotions as Harry Stephenson (January 25) is inviting us to do and for the sake of convenience rid ourselves of those people whose lives are deemed to be not worth living?
He wants everyone to join with the supporters of the Assisted Dying Bill in looking forward to a day when the law will allow for the legal killing of those who are better dead than alive.
As I read his letter the world was remembering the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camp at Auschwitz.
It is a sad fact that it was a German father's written request to Adolf Hitler, asking for the Fuhrer's permission to allow for the medical assisted killing of his handicapped son, that is recognised as the seed that was to grow to become a full-blown euthanasia programme throughout Germany which resulted in many thousands of handicapped children and adults perishing.
Later it was a team of experts from this euthanasia programme who, when sent to a primitive Auschwitz, were able to use their expertise to introduce new methods which eventually prepared the way for mass killing on an industrial scale which we know as the Holocaust. For those of us who have faith in God we do not see mankind as if it were some big animal farm to be treated as a commodity to be assessed on a scale from one to 10 and then dispatched when a life does not come up to a minimum standard.
The Catholic Church teaches that every human life is a gift from God and that each and every human life is to be protected from conception until natural death.
Holocaust remembrance day should warn us of the dangers from those in authority who make laws that attack human dignity when it is then all too easy to fall into the kinds of errors that eventually lead to terrors of the most monstrous kind.
SEAN TAGGART
Omagh, Co Tyrone
