@Moom1nka When this was going around originally, I saw many people, both Catholics and especially non-Catholics, scandalised by the title as it became drama of the week. It made both the Church, traditionalist, and our moral teachings look bad for no real reason.
They talk about people who have more than 2 or 3 kids as if they are selfish and evil. My father was dumbfounded and disgusted when he learned I wanted to have a large family with four or more kids. It infuriates me without end.
With the recent drama going on, I'm kinda left to reflect on the fact that my parents would've undoubtedly killed me if they felt that I was "inconvenient". Further, if I had any genetic disease, I could not see them choosing not to kill me.
"We must expect, therefore, that the poor defenseless patients are, sooner or later, going to be killed. Why? Not because they have committed any offense justifying their death, not because, for example, they have attacked a nurse or attendant, who would be entitled in legitimate self-defense to meet violence with violence...
No: these unfortunate patients are to die, not for some such reason as this but because in the judgment of some official body, on the decision of some committee, they have become “unworthy to live,” because they are classed as “unproductive members of the national community."
The judgment is that they can no longer produce any goods: they are like an old piece of machinery which no longer works, like an old horse which has become incurably lame, like a cow which no longer gives any milk. What happens to an old piece of machinery? It is thrown on the scrap heap. What happens to a lame horse, an unproductive cow?
I will not pursue the comparison to the end – so fearful is its appropriateness and its illuminating power.
But we are not here concerned with pieces of machinery; we are not dealing with horses and cows, whose sole function is to serve mankind, to produce goods for mankind. They may be broken up; they may be slaughtered when they no longer perform this function.
No: We are concerned with men and women, our fellow creatures, our brothers and sisters! Poor human beings, ill human beings, they are unproductive, if you will. But does that mean that they have lost the right to live? Have you, have I, the right to live only so long as we are productive, so long as we are recognized by others as productive?
If the principle that men is entitled to kill his unproductive fellow-man is established and applied, then woe betide all of us when we become aged and infirm!
If it is legitimate to kill unproductive members of the community, woe betide the disabled who have sacrificed their health or their limbs in the productive process!
If unproductive men and women can be disposed of by violent means, woe betide our brave soldiers who return home with major disabilities as cripples, as invalids! If it is once admitted that men have the right to kill “unproductive” fellow-men – even though it is at present applied only to poor and defenseless mentally ill patients – then the way is open for the murder of all unproductive men and women: the incurably ill, the handicapped who are unable to work, those disabled in industry or war.
The way is open, indeed, for the murder of all of us when we become old and infirm and therefore unproductive...
Then no man will be safe: some committee or other will be able to put him on the list of “unproductive” persons, who in their judgment have become “unworthy to live”. And there will be no police to protect him, no court to avenge his murder and bring his murderers to justice.
Who could then have any confidence in a doctor? He might report a patient as unproductive and then be given instructions to kill him! It does not bear thinking of, the moral depravity, the universal mistrust which will spread even in the bosom of the family, if this terrible doctrine is tolerated, accepted and put into practice.
Woe betide mankind, woe betide our German people, if the divine commandment, “Thou shalt not kill”, which the Lord proclaimed on Sinai amid thunder and lightning, which God our Creator wrote into man's conscience from the beginning, if this commandment is not merely violated but the violation is tolerated and remains unpunished!"
~Bishop of Münster, Clemens August Count von Galen, Sunday, August 3, 1941, in Münster Cathedral
one of the craziest factual situations that sounds completely made up is that before artificial insemination was routine, normalized, or even technically legal (unclear, sometime around the 1950s), doctors in hospitals would still do it: they would just tell the women not to tell anyone, and use medical students as the donors - the medical students having already assessed their own health and demonstrated a relatively high degree of aptitude.
this was also before refrigeration was part of the procedure, so the doctors would simply ask the medical students to produce a sample around the time the women had appointments, the students would send the sample to his office, and the women would use it and leave. presumably at least hundreds if not thousands of children were fathered this way - covertly, by medical students who just so happened to work in the same place as these doctors.
this is all documented extensively in a film called 'filling in the blanks' where one of the medical students who did this is now in his 80s and is discovered to be the father of the director. he's interviewed about it in detail, has had a large number of his biological children now contact him after getting commercial DNA results, and estimates he personally fathered around 60 children.
An Austrian noble marries a Japanese woman, who proceeds to give birth to a hāfu son that becomes the founding father of the European unification movement. What a bizarre piece of history.