Life Unworthy of Life?
By Jon Imbody

An article admitting and advocating infanticide in the Netherlands, recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine, will shock anyone unacquainted with Dutch medical practice. The Dutch authors, Drs. Eduard Verhagen and Pieter Sauer, sanguinely defend the apparently widespread Dutch practice of killing infants deemed "life unworthy of life."

Of course, that's not the phrase the respectable Dutch doctors used. That's what the Nazis called it.

Drs. Verhagen and Sauer advocate in their Journal article the killing of "newborns who have serious disorders or deformities associated with suffering that cannot be alleviated and for whom there is no hope of improvement."

That's pretty much how the Nazis put it, too.

In October 1939, Hitler issued an order expanding "the authority of certain physicians to be designated by name in such manner that persons who, according to human judgment, are incurable can, upon a most careful diagnosis of their condition of sickness, be accorded a mercy death."

Code named "Aktion T 4," the Nazi euthanasia program to eliminate "life unworthy of life" targeted for death by injection or gradual starvation any newborns and children through age three who showed symptoms of mental retardation or physical deformity. The Nazi euthanasia program quickly expanded to include older disabled children and adults. Newly erected gas chambers and crematoriums in six euthanasia centers promoted the chilling lethal efficiency that would become the hallmark of the Holocaust.

Dutch euthanasia doctors, of course, vehemently reject any comparison to the Nazis. Nor would they appreciate a comparison to the euthanasia doctors of ancient Greece and Rome. In those ancient days, doctors and politicians alike exterminated infants, the elderly, and the infirm with impunity. Such practices can only persist with cultural endorsement, and prominent Greek and Roman philosophers propped up the rampant euthanasia with utilitarian justifications not unlike Darwin's doctrine of the survival of the fittest.

While a few classical teachers deplored the practice of infanticide and euthanasia - - most notably Hippocrates, whose core teachings remain enshrined in the famous code of medical ethics - - it was not until Judeo-Christian ethics began to infiltrate cultures that babies began to enjoy a measure of protection.

This confluence of biblical and Hippocratic values prevailed in the Netherlands until the 1960s, when radical elements in Dutch society revolted against what they viewed as oppressive Calvinism and Catholicism and introduced nouveau libertarianism and license.

So when a decade ago, government-sponsored studies revealed that Dutch doctors widely practiced illegal euthanasia - - including nearly 1,000 admitted medical deaths without patient consent - - politicians simply legalized the practice.

The nation that depends on dikes for protection against floods also depends on regulations to protect its citizens from abuse. Dutch euthanasia advocates routinely dismiss concerns about abuse by pointing to a series of "strict" regulations governing the procedure.

Yet case after court case of violations of these procedures has produced hardly a handful of convictions. Like car drivers with radar detectors exceeding the speed limit, Dutch doctors make death decisions with impunity, confident that no Dutch court can muster a conviction.

Dr. Joop Stolk, a professor at the Free University in Amsterdam and an expert and author on the mentally disabled, explained to me in an interview several years ago how the courts laid the groundwork for infant euthanasia.

A Down syndrome child had developed a bowel obstruction that prevented the child from eating but could have been easily fixed with surgery. Yet the parents had refused the surgery. The courts refused to intervene to protect the child's life.

"The high court said that the parents and the doctors should not be prosecuted because the child would have had a miserable life," Dr. Stolk related. "And that was reason enough to let the child die."

Doctors, of course, got the message.

As Dr. Stolk explained, "This is so important, because when the high court tells something with this argumentation, every doctor in the same circumstances can decide to kill a child or let the child die because it is not according to the law. There is no law for these cases; it is a blank area where doctors can decide according to their own opinion.

"They can always say, 'Look at the high court in the famous case of that child where the court did not prosecute my colleagues.'"

Some doctors in the northern province of Groningen, now the locus of the infanticide advocated by Drs. Verhagen and Sauer, apparently have been killing their patients for years.

I interviewed Dutch scholar Henk Reitsema, who related how his beloved grandfather, a cancer patient, naively asked a nursing home doctor in Groningen for relief of a painful thrombosis in his leg. The "compassionate" Dutch physician instead withheld food and water from Grandpa Reitsema while administering lethal doses of morphine. He died before the family could intervene.

News media eventually uncovered records suggesting that the nursing home had pursued a diabolical "bed-clearing" policy of involuntary euthanasia. Need a bed? Euthanize a patient.

"The family wanted to press charges against the doctor," Mr. Reitsema explained to me, "and collected some of the data for that. But it proved to be a no-win situation. Only the most extremely harsh cases ever come to court, and even then, the approach of the court is always extremely lenient. It's always in favor of the doctors: 'Maybe a judgment error'"

With a wink and a nod from the courts guaranteed, it is not surprising that Groningen University Hospital now empowers its doctors to euthanize children under the age of 12. Like all other euthanasia regulations, the Groningen protocol "safeguards" are virtually unenforceable. The unassailable doctors must simply diagnose the child as having an "incurable illness" or "intolerable" suffering.

Will the flood of non-voluntary medical deaths in Holland remain behind Dutch dikes? In the United States, Oregon now sanctions assisted suicides and shrouds them in a veil of state secrecy.

Legislatures and voters in other states, including Hawaii, Michigan, Maine, California, and Vermont, have also danced with doctor-assisted death bills and initiatives - - some escaping with the narrowest margin of safety.

But surely infanticide is unthinkable in America?

Consider that Down syndrome children in this country hardly ever make it into the world anymore, as elective abortions routinely follow their diagnosis. The Supreme Court has created a right to suck the brains out of babies on the verge of birth, through partial-birth abortions.

Princeton University "ethicist" Peter Singer openly sanctions killing disabled babies, suggesting that "a period of 28 days after birth might be allowed before an infant is accepted as having the same right to live as others."

Think again.