Thousands of medical ethicists and bioethicists, as they are called, professionally guide the unthinkable on its passage through the debatable on the way to becoming the justifiable until it is finally established as unexceptionable.

In my over 20 years engaged in trying to push back against the bioethics movement, I have found that to be an absolutely accurate formula.

Take, as one example, dehydrating the cognitively devastated to death–a slow and potentially agonizing death. That was once unthinkable, it became debatable in the 1980s, and is now unexceptional.

Allowing infanticide has now reached the “debatable on the way to justifiable” stage–with some of the world’s most prominent bioethicists and medical/bioethical journals publishing apologies for infanticide. (Remember the “after-birth abortion” article in the Journal of Medical Ethics two years ago?)

Latest example: The Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery hosted a debate on infanticide–See!–in which the prominent Canadian bioethicist Udo Schuklenk argues in favor of the propriety of infanticide.

Killing severely ill or dying babies is okay, don’t you know, because human beings don’t have intrinsic dignity. What matters is the “quality of life ethic.” From, “Physicians Can Justifiably Euthanize Certain Severely Impaired Neonates:”

A quality-of-life ethic requires us to focus on a neonate’s current and future quality of life as relevant decision making criteria. We would ask questions such as: Does this baby have the capacity for development to an extent that will allow him or her to have a life and not merely be alive? If we reach the conclusion that it would not, we would have reason to conclude that his life is not worth living.

That is an entirely subjective question, isn’t it? It’s in the eye of the utilitarian beholder.

Schuklenk might say–I don’t know–that only a baby that would never be conscious should be killed. But the authors of Journal of Medical Ethics article opined that Down babies could be killed because they can be aborted.

Netherlander doctors have killed babies with spina bifida and other physical disabilities. Once human value becomes subjective, the extent of the right to life is reduced to who has the power to decide.

Sometimes when this issue comes up, opponents yell, “But that’s what the Nazis did!” NO. That is what the Nazis allowed doctors who wanted infanticide to do.

German infanticide was driven by doctors and what we would now call bioethicists. Indeed, the very first infanticide, Baby Knaur, would almost surely receive the Okay-to-Kill rubber stamp from Schuklenk. From my book Culture of Death, quoting three notable history books that focused on the case:

The first known German government-approved infanticide, the killing of Baby Knauer, occurred in early 1939. The baby was blind and had a leg and an arm missing.

Baby Knauer’s father was distraught at having a disabled child. So, he wrote to Chancellor Hitler requesting permission to have the infant “put to sleep.” Hitler had been receiving many such requests from German parents of disabled babies over several years and had been waiting for just the right opportunity to launch his euthanasia plans.

The Knauer case seemed the perfect test case. He sent one of his personal physicians, Karl Rudolph Brandt, to investigate. Brandt’s instructions were to verify the facts, and if the child was disabled as described in the father’s letter, he was to assure the infant’s doctors that they could kill the child without legal consequence. With the Fuhrer’s assurance, Baby Knauer’s doctors willingly murdered their patient at the request of his father. [Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, pp. 95-96; Lifton, Nazi Doctors, pp. 50-51; Gallagher, By Trust Betrayed, pp. 95-96.]

Brandt was hanged at Nuremberg. These crimes came from a rejection of intrinsic human dignity and accepting a subjective quality of life ethic.

The question of whether it would be a wise allocation of scarce health care resources to undertake the proposed surgical procedures invariably arises in circumstances such as this. Continuing life-prolonging care for the infant would be futile, it would constitute a waste of scarce health care resources.

Health care resources ought to be deployed where they can actually benefit patients by improving their quality of life. This cannot be achieved in the scenario under consideration.

Several years ago at Princeton, I castigated the university for giving infanticide proponent Peter Singer one of the most prestigious endowed chairs in the world. He was brought to Princeton not in spite of believing in the moral propriety of killing babies (because they are supposedly not “persons”) but because of it.

In the Q and A part of the presentation, one professor objected, saying he liked academic freedom and the interplay of ideas. In reply, I asked if Princeton would ever bring the racist Noble Laureate William Shockley to the university, regardless of his expertise in physics. He said, honestly, “No.”

Exactly. Racism is beyond the pale–and properly so. The fact that Shockley’s expertise would have had nothing to do with racial politics wouldn’t have mattered. He would have been unemployable at any major university.

Infanticide is the same bigotry aimed at different victims. It is now considered a respectable and debatable proposition in bioethics.

If we don’t keep pushing back very hard, it will, one day, become unexceptional.

Deliberately Hastened Death Is Here Now, It’s Just Not Heavily Advertised

After-Birth “Abortion”: We encounter people who think
it is morally acceptable to kill babies after birth
on a regular basis at almost every campus we visit

We Are In The Middle Of A Tsunami Of Physician-Hastened Termination—Goodness Has Nothing To Do With It, Don’t Call It “Euthanasia”

I watch the people’s faces coming out of Mass, the time when their lives are most affected by our Blessed Lord’s earthly mission. Sometimes my notice is caught by a heavenly glow on the faces of mothers with many children. Little children are innocently preoccupied by more immediate emotions. But most arresting are the looks of young people, often ranging between wistfulness and angst.

Youth are faced with some of the most serious business of life, finding their future course in the midst of conflicting feelings and discordant noise from the world. Young people seeking guidance often meet with de facto apathy from those who could help them. But some of those most actively seeking to influence young people have an actual malicious intent.

One of these who have chosen evil, is Princeton bioethicist Peter Singer. The extremism of his view, that young children can be “aborted” until they are several years of age, might be dismissed as ivory tower ravings–except that the views he spearheaded are now becoming common.

“A trend seen by prolife activists that frequently engage college students on campuses nationwide is the growing acceptance of post-birth abortion, or killing the infant after he or she is born, campus prolife outreach leaders tell The College Fix.
“Anecdotal evidence by leaders of prolife groups such as Created Equal and Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust said in interviews that not only do they see more college students willing to say they support post-birth abortion, but some students even suggest children up to 4 or 5-years-old can also be killed, because they are not yet ‘self aware.’
“We encounter people who think it is morally acceptable to kill babies after birth on a regular basis at almost every campus we visit,” said Mark Harrington, director of Created Equal. “While this viewpoint is still seen as shocking by most people, it is becoming increasingly popular.”
—More college students support post-birth abortion by Mairead McArdle, Thomas Aquinas College, October 29, 2014, thecollegefix.com/post/19896/

THERE EXISTS IN CONTEMPORARY CULTURE a certain Promethean attitude which leads people to think that they can control life and death by taking the decisions about them into their own hands.… Pope John-Paul II, —Evangelium Vitae §15

Involuntary “euthanasia” needle poised over condemned person’s arm in The Giver movie

In Lois Lowry’s Newberry Award winning, young people’s novel The Giver, progtagonist Jonas resolves his youthful lifecourse quest by squarely facing up his society’s so extreme opposition to the disorder of suffering that deliberate culling of problem people is routine and mandatory.

TerrySchiavo

The depiction of Jonas’ rebellion for the cause of life is highly timely: It has been nearly 10 years since Terry Schiavo was unjustly put to death, but actually several decades since the inconvenient disabled became subject to involuntary killing.

And more than a century has transpired since Msgr. Robert Hugh Benson predicted the trends of these times, in his seminal, apocalyptic sci-fi The Lord of the World.

RobertHughBenson_LordOfTheWorld-bookCover

Julian Felsenburgh, “The Anti-Christ”

Robert Hugh Benson’s Lord of the World coming true before our eyes
Early in the book, a government volor [flyer], an airplane, has crashed in the middle of London and the protagonist, the young Catholic priest Fr. Percy Franklin, [who becomes Pope Silvester III, the last Pope], happened to be on the scene, though he was not yet known to Mabel, pretty wife of a rapidly-rising young Communist member of parliament and a devotee of the officially sanctioned state socialist atheism.
Mabel scarcely knew what happened next; but she found herself a moment later forced forward by some violent pressure from behind, til she stood shaking from head to foot with some kind of smashed body of a man moaning and stretching at her feet. There was a sort of articulate language coming from it; she caught distinctly the names of Jesus and Mary; then a voice hissed suddenly in her ears: “Let me through. I am a priest.”

She stood there a moment longer, dazed by the suddenness of the whole affair, and watched almost unintelligently the grey-haired young priest on his knees, with his coat torn open, and a crucifix out; she saw him bend close, wave his hand in a swift sign, and heard a murmur of a language she did not know. Then he was up again, holding the crucifix out before him, and she saw him begin to move forward into the midst of the red-flooded pavement, looking this way and that as if for a signal.
Down the steps of the great hospital on her right came figures running now, hatless, each carrying what looked like an old fashioned camera. She knew what those men were, and her heart leaped in relief. They were the ministers of euthanasia.

A FORMER EUTHANASIA SUPPORTER warned of a surge in deaths if the British Parliament allowed doctors to give deadly drugs to their patients. ‘Don’t do it Britain,’ said Theo Boer, a veteran European watchdog in assisted suicide cases. ‘Once the genie is out of the bottle, it is not likely ever to go back in again.’ dailymail.co.uk

Involuntary, physician-facilitated terminations have now gone mobile in the Netherlands. Coming soon to a family transition crisis near you.

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Deliberately Hastened Death Is Here Now, It’s Just Not Heavily Advertised

After-Birth “Abortion”: We encounter people who think it is morally acceptable to kill babies after birth on a regular basis at almost every campus we visit

We Are In The Middle Of A Tsunami Of Physician-Hastened Termination—Goodness Has Nothing To Do With It, Don’t Call It “Euthanasia”

After-Birth “Abortion”: We encounter people who think
it is morally acceptable to kill babies after birth
on a regular basis at almost every campus we visit