started to suffer mentally? She was given one week suspended sentence and a year's probation. Her friends handed her a single flower each in sympathy. Her supporters considered it a defeat that she was not acquitted. What is important about this case is only partly the suffering involved. Perhaps Dr. Postma's mother was better off dead. What the case shows as far as the staff of the Uncertified Human is concerned, however, is the appalling inability of the courts to understand that they are dealing, not with a particular emotional case but with a principle of whether or not we are to legislate into existence a concept of "life without value". The Dutch judiciary did realize that the situation "might lead" to unpleasant consequences but what they did not see is that the situation is an unpleasant consequence in itself. Have they forgotten so soon? THE OVULATION METHOD A study of the secretions of the vagina by two doctors from Australia, Lyn Billings MD and John Billings MD, has finally revealed a way to truly control our own fertility, through knowledge of how our body works. It is called the Ovulation Method because it teaches us to know when we are ovulating. The doctors found out that a woman's secretions give a clear indication of when she is fertile. The cycle goes like this: the woman menstruates; after she has finishing menstruating there is an indefinite period during which she had no secretions at all, called the "dry days". These are followed by several days in which there are secretions which increase; during this time the woman is fertile because the secretions keep the sperm alive and conduct them upward. She will ovulate in time for the sperm to reach the egg. The secretions become slippery and will stretch without breaking, and then become egg-white. On this day the woman ovulates. Counting this day as day one, the woman should count a total of four days. For four days the egg is passing out of her body and she is still fertile. After these four days the egg is gone and it does not matter whether there are more secretions or not; the woman can't get pregnant because the egg is gone. Menstruation begins exactly 14 days after the eggwhite day, the ovulation day, for most women. This method of detection should be tried by a woman for a month or two without intercourse until she becomes familiar with it because the semen will confuse her at first. After that, since the semen is different, the woman can tell the difference. The two doctors state that women do not ovulate twice except on the same day. Widely fluctuating periods are always a result of a variation in the number of dry days. It is possible to detect ovulation using this method regardless of whether the woman is regular or irregular, whether she has been pregnant recently or is nursing and has no periods, or whether she is in the menopause. If she finds the stringy secretions followed by the egg-white secretions, she is ovulating. Now this information can be used to pinpoint the time of fertility for those who wish to abstain. They should avoid all contact between each other's genitals because it is possible to become pregnant even if penetration does not occur or even if withdrawal is practiced. The period of abstention would last about a week. The other weeks are safe. Reliability of abstention with the ovulation method is good. Only 1.5 pregnancies occur for 100 woman/years compared to one pregnancy per 100 woman/years with the Pill. This information can also be used to determine when a woman is fertile so some other form of conception control can be used, such as condom, foam, or diaphragm. It is not necessary to use some other from of conception control during the weeks when the woman is not fertile. It may very well increase the reliability of other forms of conception control because a woman will not be tempted not to use contraception on days when she thinks she is not fertile but she really is, the time when many accidental pregnancies occur. In the doctors' studies failure of the ovulation method was traced to a failure to use the method properly, i.e. to distrust its evidence and act contrary to it. The ovulation method can be used with any form of conception control except the Pill because the Pill changes the secretions and suppresses ovulation. A woman can learn to use it while wearing an IUD in preparation for having it removed so that she can control her own fertility rather than depending on a doctor to be willing to do it for her. It is excellent for women's self-help clinics to teach. It will not make pharmaceutical houses rich and can be used in the absence of technology. The two doctors recommend that women teach each other how to use it. It is easy to use and will work for the poor. It will not mess up your body ecology. The only disadvantage I can find to it is that you cannot get pregnant "accidentally" anymore. You know when you are fertile even when you don't want to know. The ovulation method can be used for several other things. If you want to get pregnant and are having trouble it can pinpoint ovulation for you. If you want to try for a baby girl or boy it will tell you when to have sex and when to abstain to increase the chances of having a child of the sex you want. The method of sex selection described on the reverse side is 85% reliable. LEO ALEXANDER Medical Science From Child and Family, Vol. 10, No. 1, 1971 SCIENCE UNDER dictatorship becomes subordinated to the guiding philosophy of the dictatorship. Irrespective of other ideologic trappings, the guiding philosophic principle of recent dictatorships, including that of the Nazis, has been Hegelian in that what has been considered "rational utility" and corresponding doctrine and planning has replaced moral, ethical and religious values. Nazi propaganda was highly effective in perverting public opinion and public conscience, in a remarkably short time. In the medical profession this expressed itself in a rapid decline in standards of professional ethics. Medical science in Nazi Germany collaborated with this Hegelian trend particularly in the following enterprises: the mass extermination of the chronically sick in the interest of saving "useless" penses to the community as a whole; the mass extermination of those considered socially disturbing or racially and ideologically unwanted; the individual, inconspicuous extermination of those considered disloyal within the ruling group; and the ruthless use of "human experimental material" for medicomilitary research. ex This paper discusses the origins of these activities, as well as their consequences upon the body social, and the motivation of those participating in them. Preparatory propaganda Even before the Nazis took open charge in Germany, a propaganda barrage was directed against the traditional compassionate nineteenth century attitudes toward the chronically ill, and for the adoption of a utilitarian, Hegelian point of view. Sterilization and euthanasia of persons with chronic mental illnesses was discussed at a meeting of Bavarian psychiatrists in 1931.1 By 1936 extermination of the physically or socially unfit was so openly accepted that its practice was mentioned incidentally in an article published in an official German medical journal.2 Lay opinion was not neglected in this campaign. Adults were propagandized by motion pictures, one of which, entitled "I Accuse," deals entirely with euthanasia. This film depicts the life history of a woman suffering from multiple sclerosis; in it her husband, a doctor, finally kills her to the accompaniment of soft piano music rendered by a sympathetic colleague in an adjoining room. Acceptance of this ideology was implanted even in the children. A widely used high school mathematics text, Mathematics in the Service of National Political Education,3 includes problems stated in distorted terms of the cost of caring for and rehabilitating the chronically sick and crippled. One of the problems asked, for instance, how many new housing units could be built and how many marriage-allowance loans could be given to newly wedded couples for the amount of money it cost the state to care for "the crippled, the criminal and the insane." Euthanasia The first direct order for euthana sia was issued by Hitler on September 1, 1939, and an organization was set up to execute the program. Dr. Karl Brandt headed the medical section, and Phillip Bouhler the administrative section. All state institutions were required to report on patients who had been ill five years or more and who were unable to work, by filling out questionnaires giving name, race, marital status, nationality, next of kin, whether regularly visited and by whom, who bore financial responsibility and so forth. The decision regarding which patients should be killed was made entirely on the basis of this brief DR. ALEXANDER is Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Tufts University Medical School, Boston. information by expert consultants, most of whom were professors of psychiatry in the key universities. These consultants never saw the patients themselves. The thoroughness of their scrutiny can be appraised by the work of one expert, who between November 14 and December 1, 1940, evaluated 2109 questionnaires. These questionnaires were collected by a "Realm's Work Committee of Institutions for Cure and Care." A parallel organization devoted exclusively to the killing of children was known by the similarly euphemistic name of "Realm's Committee for Scientific Approach to Severe Illness Due to Heredity and Constitution." The "Charitable Transport Company for the Sick" transported patients to the killing centers, and the "Charitable Foundation for Institutional Care" was in charge of collecting the cost of the killings from the relatives, without, however, informing them what the charges were for; in the death certificates the cause of death was falsified. What these activities meant to the population at large was well expressed by a few hardy souls who dared to protest. A member of the court of appeals at Frankfurt-amMain wrote in December, 1939: There is constant discussion of the question of the destruction of socially unfit life in the places where there are mental institutions, in neighboring towns, sometimes over a large area, throughout the Rhineland, for example. The people have come to recognize the vehicles in which the patients are taken from their original institution to the intermediate institution and from there to the liquidation institution. I am told that when they see these buses even the children call out: "They're taking some more people to be gassed.' From Limburg it is reported that every day from one to three buses with shades drawn pass through on the way from Weilmunster to Hadamar, delivering inmates to the liquidation institution there. According to the stories the arrivals are immediately stripped to the skin, dressed in paper shirts, and forthwith taken to a gas chamber, where they are liquidated with hydrocyanic acid gas and an added anesthetic. The bodies are reported to be moved to a combustion chamber by means of a conveyor belt, six bodies to a furnace. The resulting ashes are then distributed into six urns which are shipped to the families. The heavy smoke from the crematory building is said to be visible. over Hadamar every day. There is talk, furthermore, that in some cases heads and other portions of the body are removed for anatomical examination. The people working at this liquidation job in the institutions are said to be assigned from other areas and are shunned completely by the populace. This personnel is described as frequenting the bars at night and drinking heavily. Quite apart from these overt in cidents that exercise the imagination of the people, they are disquieted by the question of whether old folk who have worked hard all their lives and may merely have come into their dotage are also being liquidated. There is talk that the homes for the aged are to be cleaned out too. The people are said to be waiting for legislative regulation providing some orderly method that will insure especially that the aged feebleminded are not included in the program. Here one sees what "euthanasia" means in actual practice. According to the records, 275,000 people were put to death in these killing centers. Ghastly as this seems, it should be realized that this program was merely the entering wedge for exterminations of far greater scope in the political program for genocide of conquered nations and the racially unwanted. The methods used and personnel trained in the killing centers for the chronically sick became the nucleus of the much larger centers in the East, where the plan was to kill all Jews and Poles and to cut down the Russian population by 30,000,000. The original program developed by Nazi hotheads included also the genocide of the English, with the provision that the English males were to be used as laborers in the vacated territories in the East, there to be worked to death, whereas the English females were to be brought into Germany to improve the qualities of the German race. (This was |