Monday, April 07, 2008

The Netherlands: Decriminalizing the Unthinkable

Infanticide is murder, even if you call it C.O.M.P.A.S.S.I.O.N.

From "Decriminalizing the Unthinkable" by Wesley J. Smith, posted on 3/5/08 at cornerstonechristiancenter.org

In ancient Rome, babies born with disabilities or serious illnesses were often exposed on hills, a barbaric practice that was eventually stopped when (and because) Christianity became the Empire’s official religion. Alas, killing babies born with birth defects is making a comeback in our Post Christian times. Indeed, support for infanticide is not only gaining respectability among the bioethics and medical intelligentsia—it is becoming positively trendy. Princeton University’s Peter Singer deserves much of the blame for this change. Back when infanticide support was still an anathema, Singer began advocating for the right of parents to kill unwanted newborns. He didn’t put it that starkly, of course. He always used the example of babies born with serious disabilities such as Down syndrome.

...And now in “Ending the Life of a Newborn,” the Hastings Center Report—the most important bioethics journal in the world—has just published another pro Groningen Protocol article, granting even greater support for Dutch infanticide among the bioethics intelligentsia. Not only do the authors, a Dutch and an American bioethicist, support lethally injecting dying babies, but also those who are disabled, writing, “Critics charge that the protocol does not successfully identify which babies will die. But it is precisely those babies who could continue to live, but whose lives would be wretched in the extreme, who stand in most need of the interventions for which the protocol offers guidance.”

Read the entire commentary.

The protocol is absolutely radical - calling for the murder of infants who are not currently suffering but whom will suffer in adulthood. For specific details an excellent article has been posted at Lifesite.