Medical Advances

The National Review Online has an article detailing a new advance in British medical science, the elimination of undesireable children. These are not children still in the womb; these are infants, new borns.

The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecology (RCOG) has recommended that a debate be had about whether to permit “deliberate interventions to kill infants.”

Deliberate intervention? I've seen those. Interventions with knives, shotguns, hammers, you name it. What we have here is another euphemism by the medical profession for murder. As the London Times reports, the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecology recommendation said:

A very disabled child can mean a disabled family. If life-shortening and deliberate interventions to kill infants were available, they might have an impact on obstetric decision-making, even preventing some late term abortions, as some parents would be more confident about continuing a pregnancy and taking a risk on outcome.

And if you are not pleased with the outcome? Kid not to your liking? Still no problem if the RCOG has its way.

Some people advocate that parents be given up to a year to decide whether or not to allow their child to live. Princeton University's Peter Singer is one of them. But in some instances this has gone beyond the discussion stage.

[...] the March 10, 2005, edition of the New England Journal of Medicine published an article by Dutch physicians who have admitted to having euthanized 15-20 disabled infants. The NEJM provided them with a respectable forum in which to propose formal regulations to govern what amounts to eugenic infanticide.

This goes way beyond discussion. They are proposing regulations for the murder of new borns. Read 'em and weep:

The so-called “Groningen Protocol” (named after the Dutch hospital where the infanticides took place) posits three categories of killable infants: babies “with no chance of survival”; infants with a “poor prognosis and [who] are dependent on intensive care”; and “infants with a hopeless prognosis,” including those “not depending on intensive medical treatment but for whom a very poor quality of life…is predicted."

Sanctity of life meet quality of life. This is the battle ground between Christians and humanists. What is sacred because it was created in God's image is sacrificed because it may not have a good time.

For example, the July 10, 2005, New York Times Magazine published a column by frequent contributor Jim Holt proposing the merits of the Groningen Protocol. Holt suggested that the decision to kill ill or disabled babies should be governed by “a new moral duty,” namely, “the duty prevent suffering, especially futile suffering.”

And of course the only way this new duty can be discharged is through the death of a child. These so called moralists will line up at all hours of the day and night to protest the execution of a vicious serial murderer, but will allow the deilberate killing of an infant because it is the "kind" thing to do. Does this make any sense?