Holland To Allow ‘Baby Euthanasia’

In 1999 I picked up a book in a bargain bin entitled Seal Of Gaia by Marin Maddoux. Maddoux was a bit of a conspiracy theorist who ran a syndicated daily talk show called "Point of View." Seal of Gaia was a below-average Christian fiction book giving Maddoux's view of what the end times may look like. What the book lacked in literary quality it made up for in providing a frightening view of the future: a one-world religion based on radical environmentalism, bodies harvested for organs, and "deactivated" children. The latter caught my attention. Jack Kevorkian had just been convicted, and the topic of euthanasia was being debated across the nation.

In Seal of Gaia, the "deactivation" of children up to the age of three was allowed. If a child was ill or a parent was unable to provide a child with a quality, loving environment, a parent could take their child to a deactivation center. Here nurses dressed as clowns administered lethal injection with balloons and cartoons in the background. Back in 1999, this seemed a bit far fetched. Now, I'm not so sure.

The London Times today posted an article concerning the legalizing of child euthanasia in Holland.

When Frank and Anita’s daughter Chanou was born with an extremely rare, incurable illness in August 2000, they knew that her life would be short and battled against the odds to make it happy. They struggled around the clock against their baby’s pain. “We tried all sorts of things,” said Anita, a 37-year-old local government worker. “She cried all the time. Every time I touched her it hurt.”

Frank and Anita began to believe that their daughter would be better off dead. “She kept throwing up milk that was fed through a tube in her nose,” said Anita. “She seemed to be saying, ‘Mummy, I don’t want to live any more. Let me go’.”...

Eventually, doctors agreed to help the baby die at seven months. The feeding was stopped. Chanou was given morphine. “We were with her at that last moment,” said Anita. “She was exhausted. She took a very deep last breath. It was so peaceful. It made me feel at peace inside to know that she wasn’t suffering any more.”

Each year in Holland at least 15 seriously ill babies, most of them with severe spina bifida or chromosomal abnormalities, are helped to die by doctors acting with the parents’ consent. But only a fraction of those cases are reported to the authorities because of the doctors’ fears of being charged with murder...

Things are about to change, however, making it much easier for parents and doctors to end the suffering of an infant... A committee set up to regulate the practice will begin operating in the next few weeks, effectively making Holland, where adult euthanasia is legal, the first country in the world to allow “baby euthanasia” as well.

When Eduard Verhagen, clinical director of pediatrics at the University Medical Center in Groningen, Holland was interviewed, he explained:

"We say that deliberate ending of life is never a must. But it can be an option...At some point, we will have to decide whether it is pointless from a medical point of view and whether we should not prolong treatment... Is there any difference between watching someone drowning without doing anything and pushing them into the lake? "

I highly recommend reading the entire article. Currently, the governing guidelines for the procedure will be that the child must be "untreatably ill". The problem with opening this Pandora's box will undoubtedly be that, as times change, the rules will as well. Who is to say that Maddox's vision might not one day become a reality?