Annika sent me a link to this story with a disturbing title: Netherlands Hospital Euthanizes Babies. An excerpt:
A hospital in the Netherlands - the first nation to permit euthanasia - recently proposed guidelines for mercy killings of terminally ill newborns, and then made a startling revelation: It has already begun carrying out such procedures, which include administering a lethal dose of sedatives.
I read that first paragraph, and promptly stopped. Tears welled up. I spent a couple of minutes returning student emails, and then, calmer, returned to the article. I wanted to be open to the possibility that I was having an irrational reaction to a single inflammatory sentence. I read on:
The Groningen Protocol, as the hospital’s guidelines have come to be known, would create a legal framework for permitting doctors to actively end the life of newborns deemed to be in similar pain from incurable disease or extreme deformities.
The guideline says euthanasia is acceptable when the child’s medical team and independent doctors agree the pain cannot be eased and there is no prospect for improvement, and when parents think it’s best.
Examples include extremely premature births, where children suffer brain damage from bleeding and convulsions; and diseases where a child could only survive on life support for the rest of its life, such as severe cases of spina bifida and epidermosis bullosa, a rare blistering illness.
Now, of course, I’m welling up again. Perhaps I ought to leave the whole damned piece alone, as I am clearly too sentimental to deal with this.
My first concern as a parent would surely be that my child not be in pain. I’m not a doctor, but it strikes me that the Dutch have posited a false dichotomy: either the child is in agonizing pain, or it is euthanized. Is there no medical technology that can stop a terminally ill infant’s pain without immediately euthanizing the child? Perhaps there isn’t.
Of course, I’m sure that adequate doses of painkillers could weaken a child’s body, and even hasten death. Is there any moral difference between deliberately euthanizing a child on one hand, and simply giving the child heavy doses of pain medicine that may have the side effect of death? The outcome is surely the same, but somehow, it seems to me that there is a colossal distinction!
In my more extreme pacifist moments (especially after reading John Howard Yoder), I often remarked that "intent is irrelevant; actions are everything." (I was arguing that all violence is morally equivalent, a position I found emotionally attractive but intellectually unsustainable.) I think that’s too harsh and un-nuanced an ethic. I cannot imagine ever finding it morally acceptable to put a child to death; I can find it morally acceptable to be so aggressive in treating that child’s pain that death is hastened. (If I’m not mistaken, doctor/theologian Scott Peck makes the same point in one of his books).
Any thoughts?
Recent Comments