Posted on 11/30/2004 11:17:14 AM PST by Pyro7480
Netherlands Hospital Euthanizes Babies
By TOBY STERLING, Associated Press Writer
AMSTERDAM, Netherlands - Raising the stakes in an excruciating ethical debate, a hospital in the Netherlands — the first nation to permit euthanasia — recently proposed guidelines for mercy killings of terminally ill newborns, and then made a startling revelation: It has already begun carrying out such procedures in a handful of cases and reporting them to the government.
The announcement last month by the Groningen Academic Hospital came amid a growing discussion in Holland on whether to legalize euthanasia on people incapable of deciding for themselves whether they want to end their lives — a prospect viewed with horror by euthanasia opponents and as a natural evolution by advocates.
In August, the main Dutch doctors' association KNMG urged the Health Ministry to create an independent board to review euthanasia cases for terminally ill people "with no free will," including children, the severely mentally retarded, and people left in an irreversible coma after an accident.
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.
Catholic organizations and the Vatican have reacted with outrage to Groningen's announcement, and U.S. euthanasia opponents contend that the proposal shows the Dutch have lost their moral compass.
"The slippery slope in the Netherlands has descended already into a vertical cliff," said Wesley J. Smith, a prominent California-based critic, in an e-mail to The Associated Press.
Child euthanasia remains illegal everywhere. Experts say doctors outside of Holland do not report cases for fear of prosecution.
"As things are, people are doing this secretly and that's wrong," said Eduard Verhagen, head of Groningen's children's' clinic. "In the Netherlands we want to expose everything, to let everything be subjected to vetting."
According to the Justice Ministry, four cases of child euthanasia were reported to prosecutors in 2003. Two were reported in 2002, seven in 2001 and five in 2000. All the cases in 2003 were reported by Groningen, but some of the cases in other years were from other hospitals.
Groningen estimated the protocol would be applicable in about 10 cases per year in the Netherlands, a country with 16 million people.
Since the introduction of the Dutch law, Belgium has also legalized euthanasia, while in France, legislation to allow doctor-assisted suicide is currently under debate. In the United States, the state of Oregon is alone in allowing physician-assisted suicide, but this is under constant legal challenge.
However, experts acknowledge that doctors euthanize routinely in the United States but that such practice is hidden.
"Measures that might marginally extend a child's life by minutes or hours or days or weeks are stopped. This happens routinely, namely, every day," said Lance Stell, professor of medical ethics at Davidson College and staff ethicist at Carolinas Medical Center in the United States. "Everybody knows that it happens, but there's a lot of hypocrisy. Instead, people talk about things they're not going to do."
More than half of all deaths occur under medical supervision, so it's really about management and method of death, Stell said.
I saw the film series 25 years ago. The church where it was shown had quite a discussion after that. It was reported that some "liberals" supported the idea that "defectives" should be mandatorily euthanized. Another film is "Life not Worthy of Life". A really ugly Nazi propaganda piece. Premise was that anyone with a mental illness (real and political), "defectives", terminally ill, were a burden on society. History is repeating itself.
Is this more horrible than ripping apart babies in the womb? Sorry. I don't excited anymore as nations march into the Pit. I am just praying for conversions in advance of the Fire (since there will be no Flood this time).
Geez, that statement just DRIPS with irony... in more than one way.
Do you even see it?
Dear God, the way the left is heading in this country, this will happen here too, if it isn't already. In fact, in some cases it is.
I wonder if Nancy valued Ronnie for the five or so years he was an "unproductive vegetable"?
Welcome, my friends, to a Brave New World.
I personally know two people who were grossly misdiagnosed with spina bifida after birth. They're EXTREMELY "productive" members of society in better health than most people.
That sounds like you're losing hope, Siobhan. Even Our Lady at Fatima said that the Fire could be avoided if humanity turned from their ways.
Remaining silent is a good choice.
Sounds awfully familiar, don'tcha think?
"Princeton's Dr. Singer would be proud of 'em....."
I had to read him for an "Ethics" class.He's a nut case who believes you should be able to kill your kids up to about age 8.
I can see maybe when they're teenagers, but 8 ?
(kidding,ok?)
Screw you! If you want to use my money for such stupidity, you're going to need a lot of firepower!
It seems what Mr. K says is reasonable. IF that is what is actually being referred to in the article, and IF the parents of the dear ones approved/signed off, then it's not the end of the world situation you are painting it to be.
"I'm in favor of increasing the size of government, if that's what it takes. "
Thank you for taking a stand and stating your position. Getting Mr Pyro to follow suit is a seemingly impossible task.
"You seem to miss the irony that we've aborted 40 million future "economic producers"/taxpayers from society because they present economic hardships..."
No, I don't miss the irony - it's just that this thread topic involves already-born people, not aborted fetuses. Not all abortions are for economic reasons either. Sadly, many are due to the parents wanting a boy and thus aborting a girl. But abortion is another topic for another thread...
"Genetic and stem cell research is great. I'm all in favor of it. Embryonic stem cell research is an abject failure that treats human beings as tinker toys that can be stored away/used/manipulated/destroyed for the sake of - get this - humanity."
I tend to agree, but I personally don't have a problem using the to-be-thrown-away blastocysts in fertility clinics around the country for this purpose (stem cell). Realistically, these blastocysts (there's not heart and no brain yet so I don't personally see them as 'babies'.) will be ultimately be thrown away. I'd rather they at least serve some purpose than to be tossed.
Thanks for your response!
Funny, how you never select that option ...
Easy, Cletus. No one's coming to the compound to take your money.
What flavor's the Kool-Aid today?
GERMAN historians have identified the family whose request to Adolf Hitler that their disabled son be "put to sleep" was the catalyst for the Nazi euthanasia programme.I don't see a bit of difference here. Not a bit.The five-month-old boy, who was given a lethal drug after Hitler sent his own doctor to examine him, has been named as Gerhard Kretschmar, the son of a farm hand.
The case was to provide the rationale for a secret Nazi decree that led to "mercy killings" of almost 300,000 mentally and physically handicapped people. The Kretschmars wanted their son dead but most of the other children were forcibly taken from their parents to be killed. A few days after Gerhard died in 1939, 15 psychiatrists were summoned to Hitler's Chancellery and told that a secret euthanasia programme - dreamed of by Hitler for more than a decade - was to be put into effect. Until this month, the boy was referred to only as "Case K", the term used by Nazi doctors when the programme was launched and at the subsequent Nuremberg war-crimes trials.
Now, Gerhard's name heads the first comprehensive list of victims of the euthanasia killings, unveiled in Berlin this month as a permanent and chilling reminder of one of Hitler's lesser-known extermination programmes. It was compiled over three years after painstaking research by German government archivists into 740 previously unknown files relating to the euthanasia programme.
The files, originally taken from Hitler's Chancellery, were uncovered in archives of the Stasi, the East German secret police. It was during his trial at Nuremberg that Karl Brandt, Hitler's personal doctor, revealed that an unnamed infant had provided the Nazis with the excuse to embark on creating a master race.
The baby's father, Richard Kretschmar, from the small Saxony town of Pomssen, near Leipzig, had written to Hitler's office in early 1939 asking for permission to kill his blind and deformed son. In his testimony, Dr Brandt said:
"The father of a deformed child wrote to the Fuhrer with a request to be allowed to take the life of this child or this creature. Hitler ordered me to take care of this case. The child had been born blind, seemed to be idiotic, and a leg and parts of the arm were missing."The boy is believed to have been given luminal in the form of a dissolving tablet, causing unconsciousness and death after three to five days. The drug was later used on other victims of the euthanasia programme. Only a month after the baby's killing, in August 1939, Hitler's Interior Ministry issued the decree ordering the systematic annihilation of mentally and physically disabled children.
We, the little gods.
Doctors are wrong many, many times. Most of the time when they are wrong they wind up killing people. But they are only human, and most of the time they are right. So we accept their errors and their humanity because on the whole medicine is a very good thing.
But sometimes their error goes beyond simply being wrong or making a mistake. They fail to realize that there are some things that they just don't know, and for all their knowledge there are some lines that shouldn't be crossed.
How many stories have you read of people deemed terminal who are alive decades later? Statistically, the number is small, but it does happen.
For the most part, this is a happy resolution to their error. But for a child in the womb and his parents, trusting the doctor with the power of life and death can be a deadly mistake. Children have even survived attempted abortions, much less a simple missed diagnosis. I would never abort solely based on the doctors assessment of the child's chances.
That isn't medicine, that is playing god.
"It's not about "forgetting Reagan," who actually, didn't do quite a good job at rolling back government, other than lowering taxes. It's about valuing life at all its stages."
While I agree re:Reagan, you still haven't actually taken a stand as to what you think should be done. Are you in favor of more gov't to care for these kids or are you in favor of breaking the parents?
Please answer this question - you've done a fabulous job of dodging it in every response.
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