Concerned Women for America - Medical Infanticide Grows in the Netherlands

Search for on

Saturday, July 31, 2010

Home

Click here

Medical Infanticide Grows in the Netherlands 5/18/2005
By Bethanie Swendsen

Dutch doctors take life and death decisions into their own hands.

A recent issue of The New England Journal of Medicine documents the common practice of killing infants deemed “life unworthy of life.”

Dutch authors Drs. Edward Verhagen and Pieter Sauer write:

Of the 200,000 children born in the Netherlands every year, about 1,000 die in the first year of life. For approximately 600 of these infants, death is preceded by a medical decision regarding the end of life.

Dr. Joop Stolk of Free University in Amsterdam tells Jonathan Imbody, senior policy analyst of the Christian Medical Association, how the Dutch courts would not intervene to save the life of a Down syndrome child whose parents and doctors refused an easy life-saving surgery to reverse a minor bowel obstruction. The child eventually starved to death.

“American legislators, judges and citizens must learn the lesson of the Dutch, and hold our own doctors accountable to follow the most fundamental standard: that we not kill the helpless,” said Wendy Wright, senior policy director of Concerned Women for America.

“Many in the medical community demand autonomy, sniffing at legislators or ‘moralists’ who believe all humans, regardless of their occupation, need limits. Yet Dutch doctors are proving that even the well-educated, in a caring profession, can become unconscionably calloused,” said Wright.

According to Imbody, in the late 1960s, Biblical and Hippocratic influences were replaced by libertarianism in the Dutch medical profession.

Then, ten years ago Dutch politicians learned that they could not “employ the rationale of tolerance to eliminate persistent crimes such as prostitution and drug abuse,” so they found a better solution: Legalize it, he writes.

The medical profession in the Netherlands appears to be following the same pattern as that of its politicians. Instead of helping, supporting and providing a way for medical professionals to save these lives, they legalized killing them.

The United States is also seeing these wars raging within our own borders, as in the case of Terri Schiavo. Was she or was she not fully human? And who gets to make this decision?

The questions of “who is worthy of life” and “who gets to make these god-like decisions” begs an answer.

That’s why, in part, the struggle over misuse of the judicial filibuster is taking place in the Senate. Members of our nation’s judiciary must follow constitutional mandates—not subjective decisions about people whose only “crime” is to be disabled or sick.

The American people and politicians must note what is happening in the Netherlands (and other countries) and learn a lesson: No man—not even black-robed judges—has the right to play God.