A Belgian website features a picture of a hospital bed with some stuffed toys on it. The picture is captioned: “the latest news on the euthanasia front (from a so-called ‘civilized’ country).”¹ The image vividly captures the current drumbeat for the euthanasia of minors.²

The August 4 New York Times fired an American volley in support of letting premature babies die. Using as a backdrop the fiftieth anniversary of the premature birth of John F. Kennedy’s son Patrick, who died after two days, Emory University neonatologist April Dworetz asks, “why do we keep these babies alive?”³

Actually, that question was originally posed to Dr. Dworetz by a distraught father of an “extremely immature” baby, but the question could be hers as well. Granted, she concedes, “were he born today, Patrick, who was delivered at 34 weeks gestation, would very likely survive and have a healthy life, too.” But she immediately follows up with the hard case of a little girl born at 23 weeks who required significant medical intervention. In the end that little girl, who she calls Miracle, “will likely survive,” albeit with chronic lung disease.

The difference, however, is that fifty years ago, any child dying was a tragedy. Today, there is plenty of opinion ready to declare that certain children would be better off dead. Consider how Dr. Dworetz frames the question: “Some parents believe that withholding or withdrawing life-sustaining treatment will prevent their infant from suffering and living a life not worth living; others consider it murder.”

I didn’t know murder was a matter of opinion.

Becoming the parent of a child who is likely to be disabled or maybe even die relatively quickly is indeed a cross but, unlike fifty years ago, now a parent may also have to face a doctor who doesn’t believe in treating a baby with such a prognosis. Forget the traditional image of the doctor locked in an epic battle with death as the enemy to be vanquished. Medical “progress” today regards death as a preferred outcome, a treatment, a proper response to “wrongful life.”

 Dr. Dworetz does make the obligatory feint towards “informed consent.” “Ultimately,” she writes, “parents have the right to decide, but we physicians must help them make informed decisions.” Well, yes and no. Parents certainly have a right to make decisions about their minor child’s medical care. (Except, of course, when it comes to abortion; depending on the state they reside in, parents may not even have a right simply to be informed of a grandchild’s “termination.”) But there have always been limits to parental discretion, e.g., when Jehovah’s Witnesses refused blood transfusions for Rh factor complications, courts declared the State a temporary guardian in order to protect the baby’s life. Today, some medical authorities would like to invert that preferential option for life, arguing that if parents insist their disabled child receive care a doctor considers to be “futile,” the doctor may refuse their request.⁴ In the likelihood of treatment rationing under Obamacare, the pressure to do so will likely only grow.

 Post-natal “informed consent” is, of course, usually too late, so Dr. Dworetz’s op-ed has the necessary paragraph about appropriate counseling before birth (when, presumably, the handicap can be eliminated by eliminating the handicapped):

[W]hen in the first trimester obstetricians talk with pregnant women and their partners about testing for genetic anomalies, they should include discussion of values and attitudes toward life, death, and disability . . . Certainly parents at high risk of giving birth to premature babies, or to babies with severe congenital defects, should receive such counseling, including from neonatologists and other specialists.

During his first term in office, Ronald Reagan promulgated the “Baby Doe” regulations, which declared that “treating” a handicapped newborn by starving him to death was not “therapy” but blatant discrimination against the disabled and therefore illegal. There are, of course, those who rejected that conclusion.⁵ But, thanks to Supreme Court sanctioned abortion on demand, the question of discrimination doesn’t arise when it comes to eugenic abortion, that is, the legal extermination of physically or genetically damaged unborn babies. 

The most shocking admission in the Dworetz piece comes towards the end, when she ventures that we doctors need to do more than inform. On occasion, I’ve offered to make a life-or-death decision for parents. If they agree, they are essentially making the decision, but are shifting the burden to me. It’s harder for parents to say “I unplugged my baby” than to let the doctor do it.

Shocking, because under a veneer of compassionate reasonableness what she’s really advocating is euthanasia at the discretion of the physician. As the Dutch experience with euthanasia has shown, when doctors are granted such life-and-death power it isn’t long before some of them will act without family approval. Dr. Dworetz concludes:

Our culture is slowly growing more comfortable talking about end-of-life issues as they relate to the elderly: whether to allow a natural death or prolong life even if it means suffering.

In my world, though, the “surrogate” decision makers are young parents of [extremely premature] infants like Miracle. And they are still completely unprepared. It’s time we broaden the discussion to include them.

A society tobogganing down the slippery slope of the culture of death is “growing more comfortable” with death as a “treatment” option. I was born three years before Patrick Kennedy, and at about 32-33 weeks. In those days, my survival was extraordinary, as was my mother’s, who came down with jaundice. But I thank God I was born when doctors didn’t think death was an option. Please don’t refer me—or my three children—to one of these modern practitioners.