NDY Press Release: Disability Activists Urge Princeton University to Denounce Professor Peter Singer’s Comments, Call for His Resignation

[Editor’s Note: For a PDF formatted version of this press release, go here.]

Princeton, NJ (PRWEB) June 09, 2015

Disability rights activists from Pennsylvania Not Dead Yet and New Jersey centers for independent living, as well as groups representing parents of people with disabilities, will be marching to Princeton University and holding a protest on June 10, 2015. Activists want Princeton to publicly denounce recent statements by Professor Peter Singer, promoting ending the lives of disabled infants through denial of health care, and for Princeton to take other steps to address what the activists describe as Singer’s “hate speech” toward disabled people.

“Since about 1980, Singer has promoted public policy that would legalize the killing of disabled infants in the first month of life,” said Stephen Drake, Not Dead Yet’s research analyst and expert on Singer. “More recently, he has expanded his position in the context of health care rationing.”

In 2009, the New York Times Magazine published an article by Singer titled ‘Why We Must Ration Health Care.’ In the article Singer spoke hypothetically of assigning a life with quadriplegia as roughly half that of a life without any disability at all. On this basis, Singer laid out a case for denying health care to people with significant disabilities on the basis that these lives have less value than the lives of nondisabled people. A response signed by 20 disability rights organizations was submitted to the magazine, criticizing the decision to seek out Singer as an analyst of healthcare and for the specific content of the article.

“This was probably Peter Singer’s most direct assault on the value of the lives of people with physical disabilities past the age of infancy,” said Drake.

On April 26, 2015 on “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio,” Singer again rationalized the killing of disabled infants. Three days later, the National Council on Disability, a council appointed by the U.S. President to provide advice on disability policy, issued a press statement on Singer’s comments during the show. According to the NCD release:

Singer told Klein that health care rationing is already happening, and surmised that hospitals routinely make decisions not based on need, but rather on cost. He then used the presumed practice to rationalize the killing of disabled infants by arguing in support of “non-voluntary euthanasia” for human beings who Singer contends are not capable of understanding the choice between life and death, including “severely disabled infants, and people who through accident, illness, or old age have permanently lost the capacity to understand the issue involved.”

In addition, Not Dead Yet issued a petition to Princeton through change.org.

“We understand the importance of academic freedom,” said Alan Holdsworth of Not Dead Yet Pennsylvania. “But Princeton has a policy on ‘Respect for Others’ which ‘deplores expressions of hatred directed against any individual or group.’ If Singer’s comments about killing disabled babies don’t qualify as hatred toward a group, then I don’t know what does.”

Protesters are demanding that Princeton take four actions to address Singer’s comments:

  • Call for Singer’s resignation.
  • Publicly denounce Singer’s comments.
  • Hire a bioethicist from the disability community in a comparable position to provide a platform for views that contrast with his.
  • Create a disability policy program at Princeton to educate future leaders on an inclusive community.

1 thought on “NDY Press Release: Disability Activists Urge Princeton University to Denounce Professor Peter Singer’s Comments, Call for His Resignation

  1. Doing and succeeding by virtue of illness!

    The massive protest of the sick people who, despite of their being medic(ynic)ally diagnosed and treated as un-worthy, in-valide, dis-abled (and is there someone who is not?!), have found their strength in illness and joint their forces against an elitist dicastére in matters of ethics, namely a certain Peter Singer, who, in full contempt of the sick people, is weighing up the cost and benefits of the killing of patients (of both infants and the elder) and trivializing without any scruple and compassion the harm done to the sick and to society as a whole. Their protest has been successful, at least for the time being. The guild of philosophers, who just are gathering to their annual meeting at the Cologne Philosophy Festival, trying to save its reputation by taking refuge to all kinds of denials, does no longer want to adorn itself with this “credit” to their profession and has disinvited him (May 28, 2015).

    This was accomplished also and in spite of the fact that only two years ago the organizers of the Cologne Philosophy Festival, by deliberately ignoring the call for boycott of the Initiative gegen Mordaerzte (Action Group Against Killer Doctors), had found still quite “respectable” a certainly more dangerous specimen of euthaNAZIa propagandists and doctors of death, namely and especially a certain Dr. med. Spittler, medical expertise and consultant of the German offshoot of the Swiss “Right-to-Die-Society” EXIT (compare the US – “Compassion & Choice”). The call for boycott, therefore, did not fail to produce long lasting effects.

    That’s good for the patients’ class who is discovering and using its strength out of illness, and bad for the class of modern-euthaNAZIsts.

    Here, a few passages from the call for boycott (a German version can be viewed at http://de.scribd.com/doc/149545385/Offener-Brief-an-phil-COLOGNE-2013-EuthaNAZI-Arzt-ausladen ) to demonstrate the ‘intellectual’ affinity of euthaNAZIsts like Singer and Dr. med. Spittler.

    “We most strongly protest against the fact that the Cologne Philosophy Festival (phil.Cologne: 6-26-2013 to 6-20-2015) has given the Doctor of Death Dr. med. Johann Friedrich Spittler the opportunity to appear in public and to make propaganda for the murder of patients. It is a shame that under the guise of philosophy euthaNAZIa and killing ideologists are given a public forum. Where this is leading to we already know since the health policy mega event of 1933 et seq. (“Sieg HEIL!”). At that time doctors have assassinated treacherously, according to schedule, about 275,000 people in extermination clinics.

    There is no good or bad euthanasia, no good or bad assistance to death: all that was, is, and remains euthaNAZIa, as long as there still exists just one single medical doctor, who thus has got the say in that. Prior to that, already any attempt of discussion on that issue is but euthaNAZIa, for all the actual and future holocaust-practices [Holocaustereien].

    Who is Dr. Spittler? He’s a psychiatrist and private lecturer (“academic failure”, so colleague’s mockery for all those who have failed to succeed in an academic career at the university) who, meanwhile at retirement age and in cooperation with Hamburg ‘euthanasist’ (Sterbehelfer, literally: ‘dying-helper’) Dr. Roger Kusch, is carrying out the business of killing in the style of organized crime and who is driven with delusional zeal by the fixed idea of bringing death to others. He also works for ‘euthanasists’ (so-called ‘sui’cide assistants) in Switzerland (“EXIT”). …”

    A brief look in the Public Prosecutor’s bill of indictment may further illustrate the criminal energy by which this ‘sui’cide assistant physician sets himself to the task.

    “People who were seeking help have been killed and the perpetrators have arranged the factual circumstances in such a way that it looked like a suicide. The killings were prepared by medical ‘appraisals’ issued by Dr. Spittler. For each of his victims he had attested medical ‘sui’cide – capability, a prerequisite to his assassination (so-called “assisted suicide”), he took “more than 1.000 €” … He, Dr. Spittler, has handed down the death sentence on people who had contacted him. His medical ‘appraisals’ are killing commands by intent and effect. Without his medical advice many people would still be alive.

    Back then they were called ‘Kreuzelschreiber’ (doctors who selected the patients to be killed by putting a cross on the corresponding field of the selection forms). The medical ‘appraisers’ of the euthaNAZIST mass murder Action T 4 (275,000 people killed by physicians). The ideologists of the assassination of patients and the masterminds behind the scene (“Schreibtischtaeter” – ‘pen pushers’) were hanged at the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trials.

    Who are these people who spare no effort to push others to their death?
    Where does this bloodthirstiness come from?

    The sadistic hatred of illness on the part of the physician Spittler is obvious. “Just try to live together with a demented person; that is unacceptable” sustains doctor Spittler, trying to justify the killing. Plaintext: “life not worth living”. In this country, there are 1.4 Million people medically labeled as “dementia patients”. According to Dr. Spittler, all these people must be disposed of.

    This is extirpation propaganda against the old, against the weak, against the sick, and thus against all. Its aim is to make euthaNAZIa socially acceptable as a panacea. …”

    “It’s not about Spittler ((or, as at present, about Singer)) as a private individual. He is only one of the exponents of a murderous minority class, namely the medical doctors’ class, and Spittler ((Singer)) is part of it when it comes to prepare the grounds for a generalized license-to-kill-policy for all the sick people.

    “More and more people with dementia”, “cost factor Grandma”, “no money for medical treatment”, that is the propagandistic extirpation drumbeat to prepare the killing. The public debate is deliberately fed with pseudo dilemmas, fears are stirred up and the concerns are drawn to problems that are no problems at all because they could have been resolved already long since by an overall societal countermovement.

    And then the Spittler & Co. arrive on the scene and offer their murderous remedy: they propagate the killing of people as the solution to social problems. Again: Murder to solve social problems. Of course, they do not openly say that. They conceal their murder business behind nice-sounding words such as “self-determination”, “autonomy” and “salvation”. Nothing but hypocrisy & treacherousness.

    Within society, there are different opinions on how society can be transformed in a truly human way. This society with its different views on its future shape of human coexistence Dr. med. Spittler ((Dr. Peter Singer)) has left long ago. The urgently needed change of society as a whole must be enforced against the Spittlers ((Singers)). Because the latter oppose any such societal reverse of direction. …

    —–

    Thus far as to the protests against “bio” ethicist Singer’s euthaNAZIa propaganda show in Germany, whom the Cologne Philosophy Festival was already willing to provide a forum were it not forced to refrain from its initial intention by the call for boycott of the action group Initiative gegen Mordaerzte.

    I hope your protest action against Princeton University will succeed

    Doing and succeeding by virtue of illness

    hans drager

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