Tolerating Infanticide - Tolerating Murder

Stand to reason blog reports:

A recent study indicated that young Christians are interested in a broader array of social issues and ending abortion has become a lower priority. Some theologians and social activists encourage us to broaden our agenda, but somehow in that broader agenda abortion is not usually mentioned, and ending it is not a goal. There are a number of important concerns wrapped up in "social justice," but abortion always has to be a high priority because it has tremendous ramifications on our view of humanity, and that in turn results in further social injustices.

Wesley J. Smith warns that our society is growing more tolerant of infanticide because we've sacrificed the fundamental principle of intrinsic value in accepting legalized abortion and its philosophical companions that undermine the humanity of the most vulnerable.

A few years ago we were introduced to the "Groningen Protocol" from Holland. Shocking. Yet, the ideas weren't greeted by universal horror. The New York Times and the New England Journal of Medicine wrote sympathetic articles about Dutch infanticide. Princeton ethicist Peter Singer has been endorsing infanticide for years.

And now in "Ending the Life of a Newborn," the Hastings Center Report —the most important bioethics journal in the world—has just published another pro Groningen Protocol article, granting even greater support for Dutch infanticide among the bioethics intelligentsia. Not only do the authors, a Dutch and an American bioethicist, support lethally injecting dying babies, but also those who are disabled, writing, "Critics charge that the protocol does not successfully identify which babies will die. But it is precisely those babies who could continue to live, but whose lives would be wretched in the extreme, who stand in most need of the interventions for which the protocol offers guidance."

The article assumes that guidelines will protect against abuse, but infanticide is by definition abuse....

With growth of personhood theory that denies the intrinsic value of human life, and with the invidiously discriminatory "quality of life" ethic permeating the highest levels of the medical and bioethical thinking, we are moving toward a medical system in which babies are put down like dogs and killing is redefined as a caring act.

But bigotry is bigotry and murder is murder—even if you spell it c.o.m.p.a.s.s.i.o.n.