If Americans are shocked by the news story that North Korean
doctors kill babies with physical disabilities almost as soon as
they are born, they obviously haven't been paying attention to
what's been happening in our own medical profession. They are
probably under the impression that doctors still take the
Hippocratic oath, which includes the famed dictum "First do
no harm."
The original oath taken by graduating medical students is also
used to proscribe performing abortions. Cornell Medical School
has published a rewritten oath that not only omits those words
but erases the prohibition against euthanasia. By golly, now the
Cornell oath does not require its graduates to avoid sexual
relations with patients. Why not just call it the Hypocritical
oath?
A senior fellow at the Discovery Institute who is a special
consultant to the Center for Bioethics and Culture, Wesley Smith,
has been warning about this trend toward including killing as
part of a medical act. He recently appeared at the CUNY Graduate
Center for a debate on the politics of science and frequently
writes essays on bioethics and the decline of the medical
profession.
Mr. Smith has been sounding the alarm about individuals - such as
a Princeton University bioethicist, Peter Singer - who do not
subscribe to the idea that human life has any intrinsic value.
Mr. Smith wrote in response to my e-mail: "To Singer, a
newborn infant is the moral equivalent of a mackerel and an
advanced Alzheimer's patient is comparable to a pigeon. Singer
asserts that his theories justify infanticide and involuntary
euthanasia of cognitively disabled people and would extend to
prohibiting most human use of animals, whether for food,
clothing, entertainment, or in medical research."
According to a physician who defected from North Korea, Ri
Kwang-choi, the communist state kills babies born with physical
disabilities. Mr. Ri told members of the New Right Union that
babies with disabilities were killed in infancy in hospitals or
in homes and are quickly buried. That's why there are no disabled
people in North Korea - with the possible exception of its
leader, Kim Jong-il, whom some regard as brain dead.
This is hardly surprising news, because North Korea is a
totalitarian country. What is truly astonishing is that this
murder of the innocent occurs routinely in the formerly civilized
country of the Netherlands.
The Sunday Times of London reported on March 5: "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."
Ah yes, the operative phrase is always "the suffering of the
victim," which makes it easy to rationalize killing the poor
burdensome being.
According to the Times article, "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."
Let's all stop pretending that this is shocking. The writing's
been on the wall since the 1920s, when the saintly Margaret
Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, under the guise of helping
the poor huddled masses, did whatever she could to make sure they
didn't outbreed the "Aryan race." In "Women and
the New Race," she writes, "The most merciful thing
that a large family does to one of its infant members is to kill
it." As the youngest of six children in a very poor family,
I will always be eternally grateful that my mother was a good
Catholic.
Most pro-choicers have accused us pro-lifers of having a love
affair with the fetus. This is true, and we also love the zygote,
embryo, preemie, infant, toddler, teenager, adult, and senior
citizen. We respect life in all its stages, and when human life
is treated as dispensable in any of its developmental stages, it
also becomes cheap at any age.
Consider our own Manhattan modern mother, Amy Richards, who
killed two of her unborn triplets because she didn't want to end
up in Staten Island shopping at Costco. We know about her because
the New York Times thought her situation deserved respect.
Maybe Americans will be shocked and disgusted after learning what
goes on behind the Asian Iron Curtain. Maybe they will even be
able to put two and two together and see that this culture of
death puts us all at risk.
Today it's the babies, yesterday it was Terry Schiavo, tomorrow
... you?