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Monday, March 28, 2005
we've been on the slippery slope for years and just not known it.
I found this article linked from Molly's site. The whole article is difficult to wade through, for more reasons than one, but the basic gist of it is:
1) Passive euthanasia, practiced quietly at hospitals around the world,
is the practice of denying care to infants so that they die. Often
it's done to infants who have serious birth defects; denial of defect-related treatment (or sometimes any treatment at all) allows them to die. Generally it involves parental consent; however, in Europe especially, parental consent is becoming increasingly unnecessary. We personally had a daughter in 1997 who was born with a serious congenital heart defect; my husband I and were mystified and frustrated at the way her doctors continually disregarded our increasing concerns about her worsening condition, refused to move her corrective surgery date any nearer, and changed from one week to the next the standard for what was acceptable regarding her condition. (Week 4: Well, 02 saturations in the 80's are ok for her, but if she drops into the 70's, that's when we get concerned. Week 6: 70's won't hurt her; it's in the 60's that we get concerned. Week 8: An occasional dip into the 60's won't hurt her, but staying there for long periods, that's what we want to avoid. And so on.) At the time, we basically trusted their judgment and attributed their behavior to inattentiveness, failure to communicate with each other, or lack of emotional involvement in the case. Somewhere in the intervening years, in looking over her records and my updates about her case, I began to suspect that something like this might have been going on, but doubted it, because I simply didn't want to believe that doctors could do such a thing. Now, I wonder. Angrily. As I think I've mentioned here before, Natalie died at nine weeks of age, three weeks before the age at which she was supposed to have had her surgery.
2) Babies aren't really persons in the strict sense.
cf: "... it is difficult to determine specifically when in human ontogeny persons strictly emerge. Socializing infants into the role person draws the line conservatively. Humans do not become persons strictly until sometime after birth... . Unlike persons strictly, who are bearers of both rights and duties, persons in the social sense have rights but no duties. That is, they are not morally responsible agents, but are treated with respect (ie, rights are imputed to them) in order to establish a practice of considerable utility to moral agents: a society where kind treatment of the infirm and weak is an established practice... .The social sense of a person is a way of treating certain instances of human life in order to secure the life of persons strictly.
In other words, a person's not REALLY a person till s/he is "a morally responsible agent", and letting anyone else (especially a baby) be considered a person is basically just being nice.
This is an article in a respected medical journal. This is not some
scaremongering site. What is happening in our world??
