[tri-med] Hastings Center promotes infanticide

I thought that this might be of interest as it pertains to the recent Hastings 
paper about ending the life of a newborn. 
Wesley J Smith is a lawyer and advocate for the rights of the vulnerable. He 
wrote a book about the culture of death that we are in. He is very well known. 
He spoke at the same conference that I did in November which was on the topic 
of euthanasia and disability.

barb













 
----- Original Message ----- 
From: Wesley J. 
Smith 
To: Wesley J. Smith 
Sent: Friday, February 15, 2008 2:19 PM
Subject: Hastings Center promotes infanticide



http://www.wesleyjsmith.com/blog/blogger.html 

 
Promoting 
Infanticide in the HASTINGS CENTER REPORT 

The Hastings Center Report is the 
world's most prestigious bioethics journal. Articles published in its pages are 
generally in the mainstream thinking of bioethics discourse and at the heart of 
the process of debate within bioethics that often leads to changes in public 
policy--such as the discussions in the 1980s about dehydrating the cognitively 
impaired led to routine withholding of sustenance today.

In the last 
several years, Report articles have promoted 
a "duty to die" and a right to assisted 
suicide for the mentally ill. In the most recent edition, it promotes Dutch 
style infanticide. From the article "Ending the Life of a Newborn," (Hastings 
Center Report 38, 1 pp. 42-51 )by an American bioethicist named Hilde Lindemann 
and a Dutch bioethicist named Marian Verkerk (no link available). The authors 
approve of the so-called "Groningen Protocol," under which doctors murder dying 
and disabled babies in the Netherlands without legal consequence. (I call it 
murder because that is how it is still defined in Dutch law.) The Protocol 
permits babies to be lethally injected if: 
1: they have no 
chance of survival (which is sometimes misdiagnosed); 2, if they "may survive 
after a period of intensive treatment but expectation for their future are very 
grim;" or, 3 they have an extremely poor prognosis "who do not depend on 
technology for physiologic stability and whose suffering is severe, sustained, 
and cannot be alleviated."
The authors defend the 
Protocol from most criticisms, even to the point that they believe killing the 
non terminally ill is more important that terminating babies about to 
die:
Critics charge that the 
protocol does not successfully identify which babies will die. But it is 
precisely those babies who could continue to live, but whose lives would be 
wretched in the extreme, who stand in most need of the interventions for which 
the protocol offers guidance
They proceed to discuss 
at great length the issues involved in doctors and parents determining whether 
a 
disabled baby's future life will be worth living. Here is a sampling of their 
murder-promoting advocacy:
Where the Dutch go 
further than other countries is in their shared belief that even newborns have 
a 
fundamental interest in not prolonging a life that is or will become an 
intolerable burden to them. This understanding is buttressed by a 
consensus--within the National Association of Pediatricians, for example, but 
also in the wider community--on some criteria regarding quality of life, 
including the amount of suffering that is to be accepted, the capacities for 
communication (nonverbally as well as verbally),the capacities to live a 
self-supporting life, and the dependency on care institutions. It is one of the 
harsh realities of twenty-first-century medicine that quality-of-life judgments 
must be made. What we must not do is pretend that we do not already make them, 
and that there is somehow something morally different about doing it for a 
newborn baby.

One might object that even if we do make 
quality-of-life judgments for others, there is surely a moral difference 
between 
killing and letting die. In fact, sometimes there is, and sometimes there 
isn't. 
As James Rachels has famously argued, whether you drown your six-year-old 
nephew 
in the bathtub so that you can collect his inheritance or merely refuse to 
intervene as he slips and hits his head and falls face down into the bathwater, 
either way you are a murderer. [Me: And both are evil, 
just like infanticide.] We 
agree with Rachels that actively ending a life can sometimes be more humane 
than 
waiting for the person to die, and that in the desperate cases where death does 
not come of its own accord to end unendurable suffering, the morally right 
thing 
to do is to summon it.
The article 
assumes that guidelines will protect against abuse, but infanticide is by 
definition 
abuse. Moreover, the euthanasia guidelines for adults and teenagers 
have not held, so why should anyone expect that those being established in the 
Netherlands for legalized infanticide will? Even the authors understand that 
mistakes will happen and, typical of the mindset, assume that if murder of the 
helpless is committed in front of an open window it is somehow more 
acceptable:
Determining in an instant 
case whether the protocol is applicable will always require judgment, and 
because the stakes are inordinately high no matter what is decided, the 
judgment 
must be made with fear and trembling. That said, however, we believe that 
transparency in the deliberations concerning the ending of an infant's 
life--which is just as important as it is in the deliberations concerning 
euthanasia in adults--is adequately promoted by the protocol's 
requirements.

Concerning the larger question of whether 
the practice for which the protocol was developed can be morally justified, we 
think it can--in the Netherlands, at any rate. When a tragically impaired 
infant 
is born into a society that is hospitable to its children, offers universal 
access to decent health care, and promotes an ethos among its citizens whereby 
they look after each other as a matter of course, we believe that the doctor's 
ending the baby's life could be the best, most caring 
response.
It wasn't many years ago 
that almost everyone accepted that infanticide is intrinsically and inherently 
wrong. No more. With personhood theory and the "quality of life ethic 
increasingly permeating the highest levels of the medical and bioethical 
intelligentsia, we are moving toward a medical system in which babies are put 
down like dogs and killing is redefined as compassion.

But bigotry is 
bigotry even if you spell it c.o.m.p.a.s.s.i.o.n. And to think, after World War 
II German doctors were hanged for doing precisely what is being promoted in 
"prestigious" the Hastings 
Center Report. 
 

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