Killing Children Now in Case They Might Suffer in the Future

Fairly often I’m taken to task by some of my friends for suggesting that state-sanctioned eugenics is alive and well in the 21^st century. I have a question to ask them:

Explain to me that what I’m about to report is not eugenics in its purest, simplest, and ugliest form.

First, a standard definition of eugenics:

the study of or belief in the possibility of improving the qualities of the human species or a human population, esp. by such means as discouraging reproduction by persons having genetic defects or presumed to have inheritable undesirable traits (negative eugenics).

The Nazis took eugenics a step further to take care of all those pesky people with medical and other disabilities who were inconveniently alive, believing that they were so debilitated that they had no acceptable quality of life.

The Dutch are now doing the same. (Google translate will give you a close English version).

Read on.

On Monday, a Dutch medical researcher, Hilde Buiting, called for another step down the slippery slope to pure insanity by calling for the government and the medical profession to change the rules on euthanizing newborn infants.

NOTE: I said change the rules, not devise the rules, because euthanizing newborns in the Netherlands has been officially allowed for quite a while, via the so-called Groningen Protocol of 2006.

In 2006 the argument was the same as what I’ll share below: Killing newborns was already happening in Dutch hospitals, but it was unregulated and therefore uncontrolled.

PRESTO!! Develop a medical set of rules that lay out when doctors may kill newborns. The Groningen Protocol makes killing newborn infants OK!! (An act of love and mercy, you understand).

I really wish I were making this up.

So now, in 2009, the Dutch are again pushing toward expanding euthanasia beyond the Groningen Protocol.

Sidebar: The Dutch already have precedent in killing adults to rely on for how they are now trying to justify killing more newborns. Initially, adult assisted suicide and euthanasia was officially only allowed for the terminally ill in unbearable and uncontrollable suffering. Now, years later, adult assisted suicide and euthanasia have morphed to where medical killing can be carried out for a host of other reasons, even if people are not terminally ill and even if they have no physical illness.

With me so far?

Here’s the new proposal from Ms. Buiting:

The current guidelines state that there must be actual grave suffering on the part of the newborn,. . . In practice, physicians look not only to the actual suffering of the sick newborn, but also to the grave suffering foreseen in the future. This reality should be included in the considerations in adapting the guidelines. . . . Given that we in the Netherlands find it important to exercise social control over the active killing of newborns, the guidelines should therefore be adjusted.

See the change? Now they want to kill newborns because of what they might suffer in the murky future.

Oh, and don’t forget about the “social control” part either.

That’s a chilling step past killing newborns that are already suffering, and like the Nazis, this is, as Ms. Buiting so cavalierly noted, a medical and government-sanctioned form of exercising social control.

Again, I ask, how is this not state- and medically sanctioned eugenics?

Prove me wrong, I beg of you, so that I can stop thinking that the unthinkable is now not only thinkable but doable; that we now want to judge newborn infants as so medically disabled that they should be killed by the white-coated, stethoscope-carrying grisly necromancers divining future suffering in order to kill infants now.