Euthanasia
Sir: Mr Gadd's letter against euthanasia ends with the question, "Why put an end to that?" With your permission, I propose to answer it, and in very simple terms.
The shortage of good nurses is notorious, and there are many human beings greatly in need of their services. To devote both the money of those human beings and the priceless human qualities of the nurse to the care of a hydrocephalic idiot is an affront to human dignity (I use a modish term) far worse than any method of capital punishment I have heard advocated. The young lady's commendable wish to see a pair of clear and lovely eyes light up with pleasure could as easily have been gratified by a kitten, but no one should make a career of keeping pets.
Incidentally, a few years ago a couple was most unjustly pilloried for refusing to take home from the maternity hospital a healthy mongol child. I suspect the organisation of which Mr Gadd was an official had a hand in this publicity, but be that as it may, how would he like to bring up his daughter with an imbecile brother three or four years her senior?
Mr Gadd may call me a sentimentalist; others may dub me a neo-Nazi for my use of the word ' human '. To make things easy all round, I would like to end by quoting a stanza from Kipling: That which is marred at birth Time will not mend, Nor water out of bitter well make clean; All evil thing returneth, at the end, Or elseway walketh in our blood unseen.
Whereby the more is sorrow in certaine — Dayspring mishandled cometh not againe.
C. N. Gilmore 197 Woodstock Road, Oxford.
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