Doctors Want Power To Kill Disabled Babies

"The college’s [Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecology] submission to the inquiry states: “We would like the working party to think more radically about non-resuscitation, withdrawal of treatment decisions, the best interests test and active euthanasia as they are ways of widening the management options available to the sickest of newborns.”

"However, John Wyatt, consultant neonatologist at University College London hospital, said: “Intentional killing is not part of medical care.” He added: “The majority of doctors and health professionals believe that once you introduce the possibility of intentional killing into medical practice you change the fundamental nature of medicine. It immediately becomes a subjective decision as to whose life is worthwhile.” - The Sunday Times, Britain, November 5, 2006, Doctors: Let Us Kill Disabled Babies


Barbara Loe Fisher Commentary:

The tragic consequence of allowing one small group of individuals in society - those who choose to become medical doctors (M.D.'s) or scientists (Ph.D.'s) - to make life and death decisions for others is that they can become drunk with power and end up exploiting people. Those elitists who would force people to take medical risks or even kill people in the name of the greater good of society cannot and should not be trusted.

Blind faith and trust in those who practice any profession is dangerous, but it is especially dangerous if it requires abandoning individual autonomy and the human right to informed consent. If the birthing rooms and newborn nurseries of the world become killing fields and those who practice science and medicine become the executioners, then it will be a very short time before nursing homes, doctor's offices and public health clinics are legally allowed to stock lethal injections.

History that is not remembered will be repeated. We would do well to remember what happened in pre-World War II Germany, when doctors were legally allowed to kill anyone in society considered to be a threat to the public health and welfare. Are we preparing for the day when doctors can not only kill handicapped newborns but also handicapped older children and adults, including the vaccine injured who face a lifetime of long term care? Anyone the medical elite consider to be an economic liability for society and, therefore, expendable could be a target for elimination in what could become the ultimate free exercise of the utilitarian rationale discredited at the Doctor's Trial at Nuremberg in 1947 as inherently evil.

I remember when the U.S. Supreme Court issued its famous 1973 legal decision in Roe v Wade, siding with the medical doctors and scientists, who argued that life did not begin at conception but only at birth and, therefore, termination of not only handicapped babies but also healthy babies in the womb was not murder. Like many young women, I ignored the warnings of spirtual leaders who argued that legalized abortion was devaluation of individual life and would lead to future legalized murder after birth when an individual's life became inconvenient or expensive.

I caught my breath when I read the following from a British bioethicist commenting how the morality of giving doctors a legal license to kill: "The college’s submission was also welcomed by John Harris, a member of the government’s Human Genetics Commission and professor of bioethics at Manchester University. “We can terminate for serious foetal abnormality up to term but cannot kill a newborn. What do people think has happened in the passage down the birth canal to make it okay to kill the foetus at one end of the birth canal but not at the other?” he said.

Anyone who has had to make the difficult decision of whether to cease employing extraordinary measures to prolong a terminally ill loved one's life knows well the difference between a "do not resuscitate" order and a lethal injection. Perhaps we should have listened a little more carefully to the spiritual leaders who warned that giving the medical profession the power to deliberatey kill before birth would tempt them to seek the power to deliberately kill after birth. In any case, it is time to put the breaks on giving more power to those in society who are supposed to be healers, not executioners.