"let me cite another authority, bioethicist Edmund Pellegrino. In 1997 he penned an important article entitled “The Nazi Doctors and Nuremberg: Some Moral Lessons Revisited”. It is worth citing here.
He writes, “Moral lessons are quickly forgotten. Medical ethics is more fragile than we think. Moral reasoning based on defective premises tends to recur in new settings. Not all of the Nazi physicians were mentally deranged – they believed they were doing the right thing. If we are to avoid even attenuated errors of the same kind, we are obliged to examine a few of their errors even now.”
He reminds us of the ten basic principles contained in the 1949 Nuremberg Code (see the link provided below), and discusses how an entire nation could embark upon such a course:
“What the Nazi doctors illustrate is that ethical teaching has to be sustained by the ethical values of the larger community. In Germany, this support system was weakened well before the Holocaust and the experiments at Auschwitz. German academics, especially psychiatrists, were leaders in theories of racial superiority, social Darwinism, and the genetic transmissibility of mental illness before Hitler came to power. They even urged the Hitler regime to adopt these nefarious ideals.
“Clearly, protection of the integrity of medical ethics is important for all of society. If medicine becomes, as Nazi medicine did, the handmaiden of economics, politics, or any force other than one that promotes the good of the patient, it loses its soul and becomes an instrument that justifies oppression and the violation of human rights. Subversion becomes a greater danger whenever medicine comes too close to the power of the state. "
Abortion and the Nazi Doctors » Bill Muehlenberg’s CultureWatch
Think of that next time you want to use the "murder is a legal term!" argument.