QUESTION: At the convention of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, held in Kansas City , Missouri , 1948, the following resolution emanating from the Commission on Justice and Peace, was adopted:
This Conference notes that a committee of two thousand physicians in the State of New York has drafted a bill for presentation to the New York Legislature seeking to legalize the practice of orderly scientific euthanasia. We recommend that a special committee of the Conference be appointed to study this important question in the light of Jewish teaching and to bring in a report at the next meeting.*
ANSWER: To carry out the mandate of this resolution, the President of the Conference appointed a committee consisting of the Committee on Responsa and Rabbis Abram V. Goodman and Leon Fram. This committee submits the following report:
Neither in its theoretical nor in its practical aspects does euthanasia present anything new. Among certain primitive peoples, as Westermarck has pointed out, some form of euthanasia has always been prevalent. In ancient Greece, euthanasia was countenanced in some city states, and in Sparta it was rigidly practiced by the state itself. Plato and Aristotle , we know, endorsed it in principle. In the Renaissance period, no less important a person than Sir Thomas More advocated the practice of euthanasia in its voluntary form. He made special provision for it in his Utopia. In modern times, during the brief rule of the Nazis , Systematic euthanasia, involving the lives of the"useless" and the incurably ill, was authorized by the head of the State and prosecuted with Customary ruthlessness(New Republic, May 3, 1941; William Shirer , Berlin Diary , pp. 454-459).
It is a curious but incontrovertible fact that the theory of euthanasia, even in its most restricted construction, has never invaded