[NYer]

First there was abortion, then partial-birth abortion—which is essentially infanticide—and now full-blown infanticide.

[NYer]

Princeton “bioethics” professor Peter Singer

2. Euthanasia

Often disguised by the name "mercy killing," euthanasia also is a form of homicide. No person has a right to take his own life, and no one has the right to take the life of any innocent person.

In euthanasia, the ill or elderly are killed, by action or omission, out of a misplaced sense of compassion, but true compassion cannot include intentionally doing something intrinsically evil to another person (cf. EV 73).
EV John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life)


Voter's Guide for Serious Catholics

Catholic Ping - please freepmail me if you want on/off this list

[NYer]

the first question came from Faruk Colakoglu '08. "Are [underdeveloped babies] children?" he asked.

Class of '08 - a freshman in an Ivy League College and he doesn't "know" whether underdeveloped babies are children!

Pathetic!

[ClearCase_guy]

At multiple points in this article, the students feel sadness or trepidation in dealing with these sick children. Yet (some of the students) can rationalize their way to depersonalizing the children. Nope. Their emotions are correct. They feel sad and hopeless because they see sick children suffering. They know that this is what they see. Yet they try to "get past that" and talk about "ethical decisions" in which the children are either not human or not really living at all. Fools.

[SilentServiceCPOWife]

Singer also refuses to equate killing newborns with killing adults, saying newborns are not self-aware and therefore different from adult humans and animals worthy of protection.

It's ok to murder human infants, but it's not okay to kill an animal.

[Restorer]

In discussion on the bus ride home, class member Nic Poulos '08 called Hiatt's distinction between active and passive euthanasia "semantics."

This is accurate, depending on your definition of "withdrawal of care." I consider not putting a person on intensive life support equipment to be a moral, though tragic, choice in some circumstances.

However, withdrawal of care is often used to mean not giving food or water. In my opinion, this is just plain murder, except that most murderers are decent enough to not kill their victims very, very slowly.

If you are going to kill a baby, at least have the common humanity to do it in a human way. You can go to jail for an extended period for starving a puppy to death.

[Bikers4Bush]

If I had walked in to find ghouls like that around my now 6 year old niece who was born very premature there'd have been a war.

[NYer]

Ping! (this may interest your list)

[AnAmericanMother]

I am ashamed and embarassed that my alma mater has given this ghoul a professorship and a bully pulpit to preach his gospel of death.

[madprof98]

Singer's has stirred much controversy with these views, with some groups labeling him a "baby-killer."

You mean, just because he wants to see babies killed . . . they're calling him NAMES! That is just so mean! Why, it's hate speech, pure and simple.

[vpintheak]

This is what you get at these supposed intellectual bastions of learning. Everything is relative and there are no moral limits. It is sickening, sickening, sickening. Lord have mercy on us all.

[jill1]

My daughter was born 12 weeks premature at the hospital in this article (St. Peters). She is now 4 years old and perfect, I am grateful to the doctors and staff at St. Peters and thank God every day for the excellent care we received. It's worth pointing out that this is a Catholic hospital and they will not perform any procedures that are contrary to Catholic doctrine.

[Ulysses]

Long, long ago, in a galaxy far. far away...

My wife, who was six-and-a-half months pregnant, was rushed to the hospital due to some unexpected difficulties.

A nurse asked me this question: "Do you want to take your wife or your baby home?" In an obvious state of shock, I answered, "Preferably both!" She glumly responded that neither one might be going home.

Long story short...emergency C-section, our son weighed a little more than a pound, and had very serious breathing issues. Into the neo-natal unit he went. The doctor's prognosis: "He probably won't survive through the night."

When he did make it through the first night, the prognosis was: "Your son, in all likelihood, will be blind and/or severely mentally retarded."

Almost three months later, we finally took him home from the hospital. Today, eighteen-plus years later, he's a freshman in college and is one of the brightest young men I know (Dad-bragging notwithstanding!). Every day he is a reminder to me of the precious value of every single life, even those that might be "given up on" when things don't look rosy. Every day I think about those totally dedicated neo-natal staffers who would not give up, even in difficult circumstances. And every day, I thank God for the lessons we learned because our son was not "given up on."

Sorry for the long, emotional soliloquy. I just can't believe the thrust of this article...

[little jeremiah]

Bookmark to read later...

I feel a rant coming on.

>:-[

[Cogadh na Sith]

Singer responds by saying that societies throughout history have used selective infanticide for the greater good.

Some societies also launched pogroms against Jews 'for the greater good'.....

It doesn't really make it right, does it?

[cgk]

Pro-life/pro-baby ping...

Is it a human child or not?

[MHGinTN]

Singer not withstanding, it would be well to remember that the unborn child is able to learn in the second trimester of his or her lifetime begun in the womb. Singer is but a foretaste of the abomination of desolation. He would say he serves no master, but his life and message is antithetical to a culture of life for he would be god, and his religion would be power over the lives of others vulnerable to his whim.

The following was sent to me years a go, from a person concerned for the little ones. It is a true story, BTW.

Smell Of Rain: The story of Danae comforted on God's chest

A cold March wind danced around the dead of night in Dallas as the Doctor walked into the small hospital room of Diana Blessing. Still groggy from surgery, her husband David held her hand as they braced themselves for the latest news. That afternoon of March 10, 1991, complications had forced Diana, only 24-weeks pregnant, to undergo an emergency cesarean to deliver the couple's new daughter, Danae Lu Blessing.

At 12 inches long and weighing only one pound and nine ounces, they already knew she was perilously premature. Still, the doctor's soft words dropped like bombs. 'I don't think she's going to make it', he said, as kindly as he could. "There's only a 10-percent chance she will live through the night, and even then, if by some slim chance she does make it, her future could be a very cruel one".

Numb with disbelief, David and Diana listened as the doctor described the devastating problems Danae would likely face if she survived. She would never walk, she would never talk, she would probably be blind, and she would certainly be prone to other catastrophic conditions from cerebral palsy to complete mental retardation, and on and on.

"No! No!" was all Diana could say. She and David, with their 5-year-old son Dustin, had long dreamed of the day they would have a daughter to become a family of four. Now, within a matter of hours, that dream was slipping away.

Through the dark hours of morning as Danae held onto life by the thinnest thread, Diana slipped in and out of sleep, growing more and more determined that their tiny daughter would live-and live to be a healthy, happy young girl. But David, fully awake and listening to additional dire details of their daughter's chances of ever leaving the hospital alive, much less healthy, knew he must confront his wife with the inevitable.

David walked in and said that we needed to talk about making funeral arrangements. Diana remembers 'I felt so bad for him because he was doing everything, trying to include me in what was going on, but I just wouldn't listen, I couldn't listen.' I said, "No, that is not going to happen, no way! I don't care what the doctors say; Danae is not going to die! One day she will be just fine, and she will be coming home with us!" As if willed to live by Diana's determination, Danae clung to life hour after hour, with the help of every medical machine and marvel her miniature body could endure.

But as those first days passed, a new agony set in for David and Diana. Because Danae's underdeveloped nervous system was essentially 'raw,' the lightest kiss or caress only intensified her discomfort, so they couldn't even cradle their tiny baby girl against their chests to offer the strength of their love. All they could do, as Danae struggled alone beneath the ultraviolet light in the tangle of tubes and wires, was to pray that God would stay close to their precious little girl. There was never a moment when Danae suddenly grew stronger. But as the weeks went by, she did slowly gain an ounce of weight here and an ounce of strength there.

At last, when Danae turned two months old, her parents were able to hold her in their arms for the very first time. And two months later, though doctors continued to gently but grimly warn that her chances of surviving, much less living any kind of normal life, were next to zero, Danae went home from the hospital--just as her mother had predicted.

Today, five years later, Danae is a petite but feisty young girl with glittering gray eyes and an unquenchable zest for life. She shows no signs, what so ever, of any mental or physical impairment. Simply, she is everything a little girl can be and more-but that happy ending is far from the end of her story.

One blistering afternoon in the summer of 1996 near her home in Irving, Texas, Danae was sitting in her mother's lap in the bleachers of a local ballpark where her brother Dustin's baseball team was practicing.

As always, Danae was chattering nonstop with her mother and several other adults sitting nearby when she suddenly fell silent. Hugging her arms across her chest, Danae asked, "Do you smell that?"

Smelling the air and detecting the approach of a thunderstorm, Diana replied, "Yes, it smells like rain."

Danae closed her eyes and again asked, "Do you smell that?"

Once again, her mother replied, "Yes, I think we're about to get wet, it smells like rain.

Still caught in the moment, Danae shook her head, patted her thin shoulders with her small hands and loudly announced, "No, it smells like Him. It smells like God when you lay your head on His chest."

Tears blurred Diana's eyes as Danae then happily hopped down to play with the other children. Before the rains came, her daughter's words confirmed what Diana and all the members of the extended Blessing family had known, at least in their hearts, all along. During those long days and nights of her first two months of her life, when her nerves were too sensitive for them to touch her, God was holding Danae on His chest and it is His loving scent that she remembers so well.

[Hi Heels]

Ummm.... Daughter. 25 weeks gestation. 2.4 pounds. 10 1/2 inches long. Currently an A student, freshman in high school, Silver Star Girl Scout and Red Belt in Karate. 5'5" tall, wickedly tan California Blonde who does indeed surf, bicycle, trampoline, swim, help run an dog rescue team, teach Sunday school.....

She can probably whoop that professor with one gorgeous fist tucked behind her back.

[Unknown Freeper]

Was anyone else bothered that the writer of this article refers to Calise's babies as "it?" The babies were either a boy or a girl. If the author did not know, she could have asked.

[Coleus]

Peter Singer threads on the FR

[John Locke]

Perhaps time to post this:

"Unto God the Lord belong the issues of death, that is, the disposition and manner of our death; what kind of issue and transmigration we shall have out of this world, whether prepared or sudden, whether violent or natural, whether in our perfect senses or shaken and disordered by sickness, there is no condemnation to be argued out of that, no judgment to be made upon that, for, howsoever they die, precious in his sight is the death of his saints, and with him are the issues of death; the ways of our departing out of this life are in his hands. And so in this sense of the words, this exitus mortis, the issues of death, is liberatio in morte, a deliverance in death; not that God will deliver us from dying, but that he will have a care of us in the hour of death, of what kind soever our passage be."

John Donne, of course. You can read the whole sermon here.