Posted on 11/16/2006 5:16:50 AM PST by IrishMike
The push to permit infanticide has entered the mainstream. The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecology has recommended that a debate be had about whether to permit deliberate interventions to kill infants. The recommendation, which was widely reported in the media, was in response to a query from the Nuffield Council on Bioethics concerning ethical issues pertaining to health care which prolongs the life of newborns. It was at the urging of the RCOG that euthanasia of infants was added to the topics that the council would consider. As reported by the London Times, the RCOGs recommendation states:
A very disabled child can mean a disabled family. If life-shortening and deliberate interventions to kill infants were available, they might have an impact on obstetric decision-making, even preventing some late term abortions, as some parents would be more confident about continuing a pregnancy and taking a risk on outcome.
The article goes on to quote a number of British doctors and professors who support euthanasia.
A prestigious medical association has seriously suggested that killing some babies because they are seriously ill or disabled might be ethically acceptable and, at the very least, is worthy of considered and respectable debate. It is about time that people start paying attention to this. Those who think that legal infanticide is unthinkable and preposterous are being naïve. Infanticide advocacy is no longer limited to rogue bioethicists, such as Princeton Universitys notorious Peter Singer, who has famously argued that parents be given as much as a year to decide whether to keep or kill their babies.
In fact, it has been some time since Singer was the dominant voice of infanticide advocacy. In recent years, articles aimed at normalizing the killing of disabled babies have appeared in some of the worlds most established medical publications.
(Excerpt) Read more at article.nationalreview.com ...
Whst I find most disturbing about the "alleviate the suffering" arguments in re euthanasia is their focus: it's not on the infant, it's on the welter surrounding the disabled one, and the inconvenience/disruption the child's disability causes.
children, like animals, adapt--they do the best they can with what they have. adults, on the other hand, whine and complain: too hard to do, too expensive, too short-term.
as we move down the eugenic path, i'm afraid that we lose the lessons that disability/illness have conferred as recompense: compassion, tenderness, spiritual illumination, moral enhancement, awe.
tolerance for suffering is an individual capacity--perhaps it's our last reservoir of personal freedom in an increasingly socialism-minded world.
Or your child growing up to be liberal? God knows society cannot handle that as there has been documented proof.
In that instance I would either kill the parent or send her to Iran for reeducation.
My daughter is required to take a course on global justice in college. A featured speaker each year is Peter Singer. I just shudder.
Such a slippery slope, too.
In 1990, my wife birthed our first child, a boy who was teetering between life and death. We had little hope. He was helicoptered to another facility, and put on a relatively new heart-lung (ECMO) machine to oxygenate his blood. $300,000 and a month later, he was discharged and healthy, but there was incredible angst until the very end of his stay that he had permanent brain damage and perhaps other issues.
Indeed, the outcome was such a surprise that two years later, when I was getting a prescription filled for my wife (having just delivered child #2) at 6 AM in the bowels of the huge academic hospital where we went for care, a random pharmacist knew exactly who I was by looking at my last name. Miracles happen every day here, he said, but people were still talking about that one. He was overjoyed that we were back for baby #2, and of course I left sobbing.
Today my kid is a high school sophomore, honors student, starter on junior varsity basketball and varsity baseball teams, churchgoing, all around great kid and brother to three younger siblings.
If you kill babies who have known disabilities or deformities, do you go to great, great lengths and spend $300K (more like a million bucks now) to try against all odds to save the life of a baby that under a best case scenario has horrible disabilities? Well, presumably not.
And if you don't try to save a newborn, of course you'd never do this for an 80-year old. And if not an 80-year old, ...
The logical conclusion of applying this thinking is that we kill everyone who does not pull their weight.
It's not merely that these fools lack compassion. Anyone who signs on for this thinking is simply too stupid to appreciate the logical implications.
It's coming here. Now that the leftists are in power, we'll have this plus putting granny out of her misery too.
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I wonder how Stephen Hawking feels about this.
The Culture of Death has slaughtered nearly 50 MILLION infants in the United States in the past 33 years and now they are looking for "respectability"?! What they need to do is repent and beg God for forgiveness.
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Now they want to make murder "respectable."
Pro-life ping...........we don't want babies killed.
The defined parameters would have eliminated me. I won't bore you with details, except to say that for me, life with pain and limitations is still a life worth living!
Justification for anything is simply a frame of mind.
And that's one ugly frame of a sick mind.
I could support assisted, no.. forced euthanasia for people like those.
The way these awful stories are coming out in this machine-gun fashion lately, and from all over, I am wondering if we pro-Lifers are doing little more than preaching to our choirs and counting heads for when the Reckoning comes.
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Think back to any of the recent threads addressing this issue, and you will find the above to be true. Right on the money, so to speak.
There are those who have dismissed the idea of evil in the 21st century. It is clear from this and other articles that evil exists, and is growing in influence.
My daughter is required to take a course on global justice in college. A featured speaker each year is Peter Singer. I just shudder.
He came and spoke in person before my daughter took the course. I know that some students were so disgusted that they left the lecture. When my daughter took it, they had him on tape. I assume that they got wiser. My daughter's college is not really all that far from where he teaches, although they may have had him come that one time so that they could tape him. I don't know the specifics. My dau saw through his hypocrisy with ease. He talked about economics and choices. I forget the details. But he made the point that he has money and education and therefore shouldn't be bound to the restrictions he'd place on others. It wasn't that obvious of a point, not surprisingly, but that was how my dau described his views to us.
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