Free Republic

A newspaper story came across my desk about a special pediatrician from the enlightened and progressive Netherlands. The story wasn't about Terri Schiavo, the brain-damaged woman from Florida who was being starved to death, but she figures into this too. Dr. Eduard Verhagen puts children down. Actually, he doesn't really put them down. You put animals down, not human children. He doesn't put children to sleep, either. He kills them. And he figures that if we understand his reasoning, we'll drop our old-fashioned irrational objections and agree with him. He considers those who would draw comparisons to the Holocaust as...

March 19, 2005 THE SATURDAY PROFILE A Crusade Born of a Suffering Infant's Cry BOUNDING down a metal spiral staircase that resembles a sawed-off strand of DNA, Dr. Eduard Verhagen is wrapping up a tour of what is surely the world's most controversial pediatric ward. In the last two years, Dr. Verhagen, the clinical director of pediatrics at the University Medical Center Groningen, has presided over the medically induced deaths of four extraordinarily ill newborns. For his efforts to end what he calls their unbearable and incurable suffering, Dr. Verhagen has been called Dr. Death, a second Hitler and worse...

Bounding down a spiral staircase that resembles a sawed-off strand of DNA, Dr. Eduard Verhagen is wrapping up a tour of what is surely the world's most controversial pediatric ward. In the past two years, Dr. Verhagen, the clinical director of pediatrics at the University Medical Center, Groningen, has presided over the medically induced deaths of four extraordinarily ill newborns. For his efforts to end what he calls their unbearable and incurable suffering, he has been called "Dr. Death," a second Hitler and worse, mostly by American opponents of euthanasia. snip"My first reaction to most of the criticism is: ridiculous,...

Officials from the Dutch Ministry of Justice say the legislature of the Netherlands is preparing a new protocol designed to protect doctors who euthanize newborns with severe disabilities, according to Dr. Eduard Verhagen, the head of pediatrics at Groningen Hospital. Verhagen is an outspoken advocate for killing seriously deformed babies, a procedure he admits he's performed four times in the past 16 months. "There is a small group of children for whom no treatment is possible for the congenital disease and malformations they are born with," Verhagen told the London Telegraph, explaining why he had chosen to break the law....