Nazi eugenics ‘still alive,’ says Vatican newspaper

VATICAN CITY — Proponents of euthanasia and aborting chronically ill fetuses use the same arguments that were once used by the Nazis to promote their eugenics program of mass extermination, according to the Vatican’s semiofficial newspaper.

The article appears in the May 5 issue of L’Osservatore Romano and is signed by Lucetta Scaraffia, an Italian historian.

Scaraffia’s article comes in the wake of the Italian translation of a 1920 book by two German scholars, Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche, that set the ideological foundations for the Nazi program of extermination of disabled and incurably sick people.

The authors of the 1920 book — “Allowing the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Living” — proposed that the lives of the chronically ill or of the mentally and physically disabled were “unworthy of being lived” and should be given a “charitable death.”