Two threads by me.
TAMPA, Florida, April 12, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) -- The Florida Board of Medicine has revoked the medical license of a Sarasota doctor who killed the “wrong” unborn baby in a "selective reduction" procedure.
Selective reduction is a procedure in which a doctor kills one or more of multiple unborn children by injecting a feticide into the fetus slated to be aborted. Its use has increased because of modern fertility treatments, which often result in women carrying multiple babies.
In 2006, Dr. Matthew Kuchinas attempted to kill one of two twins because it had Down syndrome and a possible heart defect, despite the fact that he had never performed the selective reduction procedure before. He found out a week after performing the procedure that he aborted the wrong fetus; the other child was killed shortly thereafter.
According to Health News Florida, he defended himself by stating that his patient knew he had never done the technique before and that he hated to tell patients "no." Kachinas has also said that there must have been a problem with the ultrasound machine he was using to target one of the fetuses.
Such testimony was found unpersuasive, and the Florida Board of Medicine revoked Kachinas' license last weekend. He has now been involuntarily hospitalized after telling a reporter that he intended to kill himself.
Kachinas had also been charged with two, less-serious offenses. In 2002 he attempted to smuggle the anesthesia drug Propofol with him when going to his job in Tampa by taping vials to his legs beneath his pants. He said that the clinic did not keep it in stock and he preferred that drug to others.
In 2004 he allegedly falsified records by claiming that an aborted fetus had died naturally.
Dr. Kachinas had also previously been accused of headbutting pro-life protestor Linda McGlade after she attempted to speak to him peacefully.
The news out of Sarasota, Florida caught many people by surprise. A doctor in the city has lost his license because he aborted what is now described as the “wrong” baby. Back in 2006, Dr. Matthew Kachinas had been asked to perform an abortion on a baby that had been identified as having Down syndrome and other congenital defects. Instead, the doctor aborted that baby’s healthy twin.
As reported in The Miami Herald:
A Sarasota doctor has lost his license for mistakenly aborting a healthy twin during a procedure targeting a deformed fetus. Immediately after the Florida Board of Medicine’s decision Saturday, Dr. Matthew Kachinas was involuntarily hospitalized because he said he planned to commit suicide. Kachinas had blamed faulty ultrasound equipment for the 2006 mistake. He was targeting a fetus with Down syndrome and signs of a heart defect.
CBS News added further details: “The woman had asked the doctor to perform a selective termination procedure on the male fetus, which had congenital defects. An ultrasound later showed that the other fetus, a female that did not appear to have medical problems, had been terminated.”
What are we to make of this? We now know that the vast majority of babies identified prenatally as carrying the genetic markers for Down syndrome are aborted. National statistics indicate that 80-90% of such babies are now aborted - meaning that we have launched a search and destroy mission on Down syndrome babies in the womb.
The situation with Dr. Kachinas reveals the horribly confused morality that marks modern America and, in far too many cases, the practice of medicine. This doctor was asked to perform what is now euphemistically called a “selective reduction.” Instead, he aborted “the wrong baby,” killing a healthy baby instead of the baby identified as carrying the markers for Down syndrome.
Consider what this means for the sanctity of human life. We are now looking at babies as consumer products. We will accept babies that meet our specified qualifications, and abort when medical tests or other factors reveal that the baby does not meet our standards. Human life is reduced to just another consumer product subject to consumer preferences and demand.
Do we recognize what this means? The abortion of Down syndrome babies is a scandal of the first degree, and this nation is growing more complacent and complicit in this scandal by the day. Beyond this, we can be certain that babies are now being targeted in the womb for reasons far beyond Down syndrome. Specialists working with autism are concerned that forthcoming genetic tests will put babies who carry markers for autism next on the list for prenatal search and destroy missions.
This news story out of Florida is a warning to the entire nation. What is the real scandal here - that this doctor was ready to kill a baby with Down syndrome, or merely that he aborted “the wrong baby?”
The answer to that question will tell us all we need to know about the conscience of the age.
Thread by me.
Ah, the Dutch: Having jumped off a vertical moral cliff when it comes to doctors killing patients, they seek to replace virtue with “transparency” through official reporting. The idea is that control over such practices can be maintained if the homicides are done in front of an open window rather than behind a closed curtain. But it doesn’t actually turn out that way. Several studies have shown that active euthanasia is dramatically under reported by death doctors–despite explicit legalization. The same is proving true of the quasi-decriminalized infanticide license–at least according to an article published in the Journal of Medical Ethics. (“Dutch experience of monitoring active ending of life for newborns,” J Med Ethics 2010;36:234-237, no link, here’s the Abstract.)
One potential reason is the apparent increase in eugenic abortion:
The introduction of ultrasound examination in 2006 at 20 weeks’ gestation as part of the routine prenatal screening in The Netherlands is another relevant development in medical practice. Although our data provide no explanations, ultrasound examination is expected to result in higher detection rates of structural congenital abnormalities, as shown in other countries where routine ultrasound examination has been an integral part of prenatal care much longer. This increased prenatal detection rate may result in more induced abortions before 24 weeks of pregnancy, fewer infants born with a congenital abnormality, and fewer postnatal deaths as a result of congenital abnormalities.” The fact that the abortion ratio (the number of induced abortions per 1000 newborns) is still increasing in The Netherlands supports this assumption. The impact of such developments is probably that the frequency of end-of-life decisions in infants in The Netherlands has decreased.
Still, aborting infants who would be disabled or dying if they were allowed to be born does not fully account for the dearth of reported infanticides. Rather than the 15-20 cases expected (in contrast, the Lancet has published two studies claiming about 80 infanticides per year), apparently only one was reported for 2007. The authors–who are Dutch bioethicists and/or physicians with different university medical centers–aren’t buying that figure, and so they seek to find out the reasons for the under reporting of the killing. It is a sickening read because it presumes the propriety of infanticide, euphemistically called “active ending of life,” and further assumes that the only real problem with the whole pogrom against what are clearly presumed to be defective infants, is one of bureaucratic i-dotting and t-crossing. From the conclusion:
We identified several changes in the practice of end-of-life decision-making for infants that may explain the lack of reporting of cases of the active ending of life. Furthermore, it seems virtually impossible to comply with the requirements in the current regulation, due to either time constraints or the nature of the suffering that is addressed. If societal control of active ending of life in newborns is considered useful, a different regulation is needed. Attention should be paid to the requirements for careful practice in the current regulation, to physicians’ awareness of when they should report their act, and to a safe legal environment
for reporting.
Yes, with euthanasia the impetus is to almost always to loosen regulations, in this case of babies, not to stop killing. But I don’t know why these authors are surprised. Killing is always best done in the dark.
Culture of death, Wesley? What culture of death?