I find it hard to believe that there is no pain relief available that will help baby.
They can give the baby morphine enough to starve it to death; why not enough to relieve its pain? I've seen patients who were in terminal illnesses whose demise was probably hastened by large amounts of pain reliever.
But the objective of the medicine was not not kill them, it was to help them with pain. Perhaps there should be more work with terminal pain relief.
One of the disturbing things in the article is babies being killed with spina bifida. Granted there is a range of severity of that disorder but I have a friend with a pretty severe case (no working bowels, paraplegic, etc) doubt he'd want to be dead.
The amount of pain relief to give is an ongoing debate in the med community. Lawsuits have caused problems here. Ask anyone who can't get pain meds because of gov interference.
I've seen old people dying of cancer who doctors don't give sufficient pain relief to "because it might interfere with his breathing". It's disgusting.
What I'm about to write may seem confusing, but it was explained to me by a priest a few years ago. If you think about it carefully, these are important distinctions. There is a moral difference between these things (even though the doctor in the article says there is not):
1. Removing an extraordinary and unnatural means of life support, such as the baby on the machine to make it breathe (or other type of machine besides one for feeding or giving nutrition).
2. Administering medical care which is essential and morally necessary (morphine) which could also have the possible effect of death.
3. Deliberately inflicting death by any means other than a medically and morally necessary means (injection, withholding food and water, etc)
#3 is immoral and murder, #1 and #2 are not. So to give the baby morphine as medical care, and run the risk of possible overdose resulting in death, is not outright murder, and is not the same as euthanasia.
Does this make sense?