Chicago, Ill., Dec 2, 2004 / 22:00 pm
The recent admission by a Dutch hospital that it has been mercy killing severely handicapped newborn babies by injecting them with lethal doses of muscle relaxant has prompted a Bill Beckman, executive director of Illinois Right to Life, to state that “the Netherlands is a country continuing down the slippery slope to the most grotesque forms of euthanasia,” reported the conservative Illinois Leader on Wednesday.
“The hospital admits it is doing this now on an illegal basis, and wants to change the country’s law to go along with what they already do,” said Beckman. Mercy killing for adults who requested it has been legal in the Netherlands for three years, and Beckman says that killing handicapped infants is the next logical step.
He pointed to Princeton University professor Peter Singer a proponent of mercy killing of handicapped infants: “If disabled newborn infants were not regarded as having a right to life until, say, a week or a month after birth,” writes Singer, “it would allow parents, in consultation with their doctors, to choose on the basis of far greater knowledge of the infant's condition than is possible before birth.”
“Killing a disabled infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. Very often it is not wrong at all,” write Singer in his 1997 book, Practical Ethics.