Infanticide
by: Jerry Price - Jan 9, 2006 - comment
“Abortion would bring along with it deadly consequences that, I felt, even those who favored abortion would not wish to see in our society. My immediate fear was that the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion, thereby denying any rights to the unborn child, would soon be extended to newborn children, especially those with handicaps. I did not think the court would rule directly on this issue. I thought instead that the denial of proper treatment to the handicapped newborn—infanticide—would follow abortion, but it would happen slowly, quietly, in the privacy of the neonatal units of our most respected hospitals. Sure enough, soon after abortion became commonplace, some physicians began to refer to a severely defective newborn—the kind I was able to operate on successfully—as a fetus ex utero. It was a strange way to refer to a baby. Reality masked by fancy words. The Supreme Court had denied human rights to a fetus, so branding a defective newborn a fetus ex utero served to deny human rights to a newborn human.”
C. Everett Koop, M.D., Koop: The Memoirs of America’s Family Doctor (New York: Random House, 1991), 265.
A Florida nurse has revealed that babies are being left to die, usually as a result of a botched abortion. Some are babies that are premature that nobody wants. Though Congress has passed the Born Alive Infants Protection Act and it has been signed into law by the president, there is concern that many infants are still dying because they are not given the care that should be their by right.
The issue of “born alive” abortions was brought to light a few years ago when Jill Stanek, a nurse at Christ Hospital in Oak Lawn, Illinois, made the practice known. Stanek says that she still hears from nurses that the practice continues in hospitals everywhere.
Maria Gallagher, Born-Alive Infanticides May Be Occurring Despite Federal Law Preventing It, February 4, 2004 [Accessed August 25, 2005]
In an article in the March 10, 2005, edition of The New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Edward Verhagen and Dr. Pieter Sauer of the Netherlands state that about 1,000 infants die in the first year of life in the Netherlands, 600 of them due to a medical decision regarding the end of life.
Dr. Joop Stolk of Free University in Amsterdam related how the Dutch courts would not intervene in the case of a young Down syndrome child whose parents and doctors refused an easy life-saving operation. The child eventually starved to death.
Wendy Wright, senior policy director of Concerned Women for America, states, “Many in the medical community demand autonomy, sniffing at legislators or ‘moralists’ who believe all humans, regardless of the occupation, need limits. Yet Dutch doctors are proving that even the well-educated, in a caring profession, can become unconscionably calloused.” Instead of helping and supporting these little lives, they are sentencing them to death.
“The American people and politicians must note what is happening in the Netherlands (and other countries) and learn a lesson: No man—not even black-robed judges—has the right to play God.”
Bethanie Swendsen, Medical Infanticide Grows in the Netherlands (Concerned Women for America), May 18, 2005
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