November 30, 2004

What Hath Man Wrought!

In a startling announcement even for the morally lax Netherlands a hospital has admitted it kills children in the name of "mercy."

The Health Ministry is preparing its response to the request, a spokesman said, and it may come as soon as December.

Three years ago, the Dutch parliament made it legal for doctors to inject a sedative and a lethal dose of muscle relaxant at the request of adult patients suffering great pain with no hope of relief.

The Groningen Protocol, as the hospital's guidelines have come to be known, would create a legal framework for permitting doctors to actively end the life of newborns deemed to be in similar pain from incurable disease or extreme deformities.

The guideline says euthanasia is acceptable when the child's medical team and independent doctors agree the pain cannot be eased and there is no prospect for improvement, and when parents think it's best.

Examples include extremely premature births, where children suffer brain damage from bleeding and convulsions; and diseases where a child could only survive on life support for the rest of its life such as spina bifida and epidermosis bullosa, a blistering illness.

The hospital said it carried out four such mercy killings in 2003, and reported all cases to government prosecutors — but there have been no legal proceedings taken against them.

A Western nation has come to the point where it's acceptable for doctors to commit an act that leads to a child's death. I'm not talking about an act of omission where care is denied and a patient dies because of that. I'm referring to an overt act where a poison is delivered that kills the patient. It starts with children with awful ailments, but it will eventually move onto children with lesser medical problems. It will even move to those who don't meet the subjective standards of parents or society. It will become a form of eugenics, but on a family scale. That doesn't make it any less decadent or evil than the early 20th century government directed version.

This is the same nation that is having convulsions over the Islamist murder of Theo Van Gough. It seems the able-bodied is considered more deserving of life than some unknown newborn afflicted in a Dutch hospital.

I'd like to think the U.S. was better, but our courts won't even allow a partial-birth abortion ban to become law. I can see how a non-Westerner could view the West as morally bankrupt by how we allow the legal killing of the unborn and now the medically vulnerable.

"Netherlands Hospital Euthanizes Babies"