Slippery Slope

Don't believe that the "slippery slope" of allowing one pro-death behavior inevitably leads to another? Check this out.

The Times online in the UK is reporting that the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecology in England is asking that the health profession there consider calling for the legalization of "active euthanasia" of newborn babies and infants.

John Harris, a member of the government's Human Genetics Commission and professor of bioethics at Manchester University, bluntly calls for the euthanizing of disabled newborns.

"We can terminate for serious foetal abnormality up to term but cannot kill a newborn. What do people think has happened in the passage down the birth canal to make it okay to kill the foetus at one end of the birth canal but not at the other?"

What other society thought it prudent to do away with its citizens who couldn't live a so-called "full quality of life"? Nazi Germany. Beginning with infants and very young children who were deemed "unworthy of life", the Nazi program, code named "Aktion T 4" quickly spread to include older children and adults. Hitler's decree in 1939 enlarged

"the authority of certain physicians to be designated by name in such manner that persons who, according to human judgment, are incurable can, upon a most careful diagnosis of their condition of sickness, be accorded a mercy death."

This was typed on his personal stationary.

The Nazi government then began to require that those with conditions such as schizophrenia, epilepsy, senile disorders, therapy resistant paralysis, syphilitic diseases, retardation, encephalitis, Huntington's chorea, and various other neurological conditions be reported for termination.

Also to be killed were those who had been continuously institutionalized for at least 5 years, were criminally insane, were not German citizens or were not of German or related blood.

As pro-euthanasia advocate, Mr. Harris so rightly points out, what is the difference between killing a pre-born infant and killing those who have already been born? What then is the difference between killing someone at birth, and killing them 6 months later? What about a year later? When will it stop?

What then, would make you or I immune?