The First Thing We Do, Let's Kill All the Babies

That's the road they're on in the Netherlands:

The "Groningen Protocol" — named after a pediatric hospital which admittedly permits doctors to end the lives of babies born with disabilities or terminal conditions — seeks to normalize infanticide by bringing the practice out of the shadows and into the light of day. Under this thinking, it isn't the killing that is wrong, but the secrecy.

Secrecy? What secrecy? It has been widely known for years that Dutch doctors kill disabled and dying babies. As far back as 1992, the Dutch Royal Society of Medicine published guidelines to be used in deciding whether to kill a baby, including whether the child would ever be able to live independently, experience "self realization" (being able to hear, read, write, labor) and have meaningful interpersonal relations.

By 1993, as documented in PBS's Choosing Death, three out of eight neonatal intensive care unites in the Netherlands had specific policies, endorsed by the Dutch Pediatric Society, that permitted infanticide by lethal injection. Rita Marker's breakthrough book Deadly Compassion (Marker leads the International Task Force on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide), raised the warning flag about Dutch infanticide in 1993. In 1996, the Lancet published a study finding that 8 percent of all Dutch infant deaths each year — between 80 and 100 — result from lethal injections, many without parental consent. I wrote about the matter extensively in my 1997 book Forced Exit.

No, the publishing of the Groningen Protocol isn't designed to end the secret that is not a secret. It is intended to legitimize eugenic infanticide and move it from a crime tolerated by the, oh, so tolerant Dutch, to outright legality. In other words, the last vestige of protection left in the Netherlands against infanticide — that is, the technical illegality of killing babies in the Netherlands — is to be stripped away, including the protection against the killing of disabled infants not dependent on intensive care for survival.

If you want to know why so many people are strenuously fighting the state-sanctioned murder of Terri Schiavo, look no further.