Redstate

It baffles me that developed societies seem eager to turn away from life saving/improving medical research to benefit the young, and/or unborn, yet are eager to improve and prolong life for the already living. Many of these segments of the world are already on a course of demographic self-extinction.

This is going to sound cynical, but, are so many amongst us determined to cure baldness and erectile dysfunction yet apathetic about the unborn/newborn?

Then I get read this.

Why don't we get back to old fashioned values. We can just expose babies that look week.

a compromise position:

One despairs of hope that a reasonable position can be reached on this issue, when the other proceeds from such a worldview.

When the worldview is ready to disregard and discard morals on life issues, is there really a compromise? Because once you compromise on one issue, you get drug right on to the next.

This is also why I don't trust the guys in the white coats, when it comes to ethics on their work. I wonder if the cure for all these deseases stem cells are supposed to cure required a one for one procedure (ie one embryo cures only one person) if we will shed the "we don't intend to harvest stem cells, we just want the ones who are going to die anyway" defense?

See in general I don't see the guys in white coats drawing moral lines, and they often just play lip service to the concerns of those of us opposed (if I had a dime for everytime I have heard, "well of course we should pay attention to their concerns, but we need to do the research anyway" I would be rich).

This is also why the desire to get the religious folk or those influenced by their religious belief out of politics, frankly the secular world of Europe is not what I want to see, where abortion is accepted and the debate has swung on over to who gets to live and who gets to die after they are out of the womb. Nope keeping the Christians around at least may put some moral checks on the ethics of science and other issues.

who might have been aborted if the parents had known earlier the extent of its disabilities and potential suffering.

So, it is not only a new born child that is suffering from a disease or a disability who should be allowed to be killed but also a child that might potentially suffer from the same. Unbelievable. And disgraceful.

"The greater danger is not that our hopes are to high and we fail to reach them; it is that they are to low and we do." Michaelangelo

Permitting euthanasia, whether for newborns or the frail elderly or whomever...is all logically consistent with voluntary abortion, isn't it?

(For me, "involuntary" abortions include mother's survival, rape and incest. And I'd define involutary homicide to include self-defense. By extension, capital punishment is also self-defense, but at a societal rather than an individual level.)

If you're not going to resist the voluntary taking of life some of the time, then I fail to see the logic in resisting it the rest of the time.

The only way to untie this Gordian logic knot, and continuing voluntary abortions, requires defining all fetuses as non-human. But the spectacular advancement trends of medical science are clearly pushing the envelope of survivable gestations steadily backward. What scientifically literate observer would assign zero probability to a totally in vitro human gestation within, say, a few decades? At that point, every fertilized egg is at least potentially "viable."

Perhaps logical consistency is overrated?

Bellinghamster

Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists going on, it won't be long until they or someone like them starts proposing that we just be allowed to kill any and all who has a severe disease or disability (if that idea hasn't been put forth already).

And I can imagine that such wonderful people as the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (and their like) would have said that it would be ok for someone such as a camp counselor I once had, who had been born with one arm with no hand, another arm with a hand but just two fingers, one leg that ended at the knee and a partial tongue; that it would be ok to kill someone in this condition so that his suffering or even potential suffering could end.

You see to me, these doctors see deformities, disabilities, and disease as imperfection that must be stamped out of our sight by any means necessary. They forget, however, that we are all perfectly created in the eyes of God. And that each of us has a mission on this earth, which no one has a right to end.

That camp counselor that I mentioned above was the most respected and admired counselor at our camp. Yes, he had physical deformities that none of us at the camp had -- and yes I'm sure that he did suffer physical from the challenges his condition sent him and also mentally, from those weaker souls would have made fun of his deformaties.

However, he also possessed in great quantity something else that was quite lacking in most of us. Courage. Courage like I had never seen and have rarely seen since. There was value in his life. Value to inspire young kids at a camp to carry on with life in spite of adversity. And his inspiration in my life (and I'm sure others who attended) continues to this day. God knew his value when he created him; the doctors at Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists most surely wouldn't have. And the world, mine specifically, would be lessor because of it.

"The greater danger is not that our hopes are to high and we fail to reach them; it is that they are to low and we do." Michaelangelo

This concept is from medical ethicistsin the Royal Colleges when, to the best of my belief, all the Royal Colleges oppose physician assisted suicide. So riddle me this: when a compos mentis adult wishes to die and persistently requests help, doctors cannot help. When a new born baby with no understanding of the issues says nothing doctors can act on their own initiative. This is ethics?

Quentin Langley
Editor of http://www.quentinlangley.net

I hadn't seen this story anywhere else (blogs or MSM news sites) except for google news.

This was shocking and yet not so shocking. It is of course the logical outworking of the beliefs held by the secular progressives.

I hope this is a wake up call to Americans as to why we need to have a culture of life. Once you have newborns being euthanized for not being 'ideal' it can't be long until the state starts taking more responsiblity for determining who should live and they start killing off the sick, old people, babies born into poor families, etc. (Even though I doubt they will ever condone killing terrorists or child molesters)

And for those conservatives who favor embyronic stem cell research, this is why you can't support that. Once you start down the path of killing some humans and not others, where do you draw the line? Before you know it we'll be living in Nazi Germany.

to choose death becomes the expectation that one will choose death; the expectation that one will choose death devolves into lobbying for the choice of death; the application of pressures towards the object of inducing someone to choose death becomes a duty towards death; the duty towards death becomes an enforceable social obligation.

All of which is, I suppose, quite obvious to most on this forum. Nevertheless, the more profound issue at stake here is that our civilization has fashioned an idol of the ideal of physical heath and perfection, when the sanguinary reality is that this idol requires sacrifice in blood: he who worships health ends by worshipping death in all its forms.

My harp is turned to mourning, and my organ shall speak with the voice of them that weep. Spare me, O Lord, for my days are truly as nothing.