Life gets a little cheaper

By Joseph Farah

“See, I have set before thee this day life and good, and death and evil.”

– Deuteronomy 30:15

When the U.S. Supreme Court struck down all state laws restricting abortion in 1973, a few wise souls warned the ruling would open up a Pandora’s box that would some day lead to state approval of murder of innocents on a broader scale.

Illegitimately legalized mass murder has brought us a holocaust of tens of millions of babies killed in the womb since that unprecedented stroke of judicial tyranny. Indeed, the killing spree was extended to babies born and partially born.

But if you want to get a glimpse of where the bloodletting is leading this country, just look around the world.

You don’t have to look at China, where forced abortion and infanticide have resulted in the deaths of more than 100 million, resulting in a major and destabilizing imbalance between the numbers of males and females.

Instead, look to the “enlightened” West, to the so-called “civilized” nations of Europe.

And look not at the statistics, but at the wrenching story of one little girl in England.

Last week, Darren and Debbie Wyatt sat in a wooden pew at the Royal Courts of Justice and listened to a judge rule that, despite their desire to seek extraordinary measures to fight for the life of their 11-month-old daughter, the baby must die.

Justice Hedley said: “I’m being asked to override the wishes of these parents as to what is best for their daughter.” And that’s just what he did.

All the medical evidence, he said, indicated that baby Charlotte was disabled with no hope of recovery and “a terrible quality of life. I do not believe any further aggressive treatment, even if necessary to prolong life, is in her best interests,” he added.

The state knows best.

But things are much worse in the Netherlands. There, the state is taking a more aggressive stance toward killing the unwanted, the unneeded, those without that enigmatic and subjective “quality of life.”

Groningen University Hospital has decided its doctors will euthanize children under the age of 12, if doctors believe their suffering is intolerable or if they have an incurable illness.

According to Wesley J. Smith, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, that means that could prove to be an excuse not to provide proper pain control for children who are dying of potentially agonizing maladies such as cancer – and simply eliminating them instead.

“For anyone paying attention to the continuing collapse of medical ethics in the Netherlands, this isn’t at all shocking,” says Smith. “Dutch doctors have been surreptitiously engaging in eugenic euthanasia of disabled babies for years.”

According to a 1997 study published in Lancet, the British medical journal, Dutch doctors were killing approximately 8 percent of all infants who died each year in the Netherlands. The study found that 45 percent of neo-natologists and 31 percent of pediatricians who responded to questionnaires had killed infants.

“It took the Dutch almost 30 years for their medical practices to fall to the point that Dutch doctors are able to engage in the kind of euthanasia activities that got some German doctors hanged after Nuremberg,” writes Smith.

Worse yet, this euthanasia madness appears to be contagious.

Neighboring Belgium is set to legalize neo-pediatric euthanasia.

This can only happen in societies that have lost sight of moral absolutes – of the very concepts of right and wrong.

Today, the arbiters of right and wrong are too often unaccountable high priests wearing black robes.

Life, they tell us, is not a gift from God, but, rather, something to be experienced by those whose lives reach some arbitrary and mysterious level of “quality.”

Only 60 years ago, the world witnessed the carnage of Hitler’s death camps and said it could never happen again.

It is happening again.

Joseph Farah

Joseph Farah is founder, editor and chief executive officer of WND. He is the author or co-author of 13 books that have sold more than 5 million copies, including his latest, "The Gospel in Every Book of the Old Testament." Before launching WND as the first independent online news outlet in 1997, he served as editor in chief of major market dailies including the legendary Sacramento Union. Read more of Joseph Farah's articles here.