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Secondhand Smoke: Britain's War Against Ill, Crippled Babies

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Seriously Disabled Babies are "Not Viable People" and Should be Aborted

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The new eugenics is growing at a horrifying pace. In the UK, a House of Lords, member argued that disabled children should be aborted for their own good.

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Seriously disabled children should be considered non-persons and would be better off having been aborted, according to a Peer speaking in the House of Lords Tuesday. Attempting to couch her assertion in terms of children's "rights",

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Molly Baroness Meacher told the Lords that children born with severe disabilities are "not viable people".

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The comments came as the Lords debated an amendment to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, put forward by Lady Swinton, Baroness Masham of Ilton, that would have protected unborn disabled children from abortion after the 24 week gestational time limit.

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The amendment was defeated by 89 votes to 22.

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Under Britain's abortion law, children judged to have some form of disability, including such comparatively minor disabilities as club foot or cleft palate, can be aborted up to the time of natural birth.

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Referring to two children she knows who were born prematurely with severe cerebral palsy, Baroness Meacher said, "They were natural births. Those two children cannot breathe naturally; they have to be helped to breathe. They will never talk. They lie on their backs and can do nothing. My belief is that there are children, born at those very early ages, who are not viable people. It would be in their best interests to have been aborted."

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Why limit the killing of the disabled to abortion?

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Why not kill babies that make it to birth with serious disabilities like they do regularly in the Netherlands?

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Indeed, why limit the killing to babies?

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After seriously injured or ill patients become non viable people let's just put their heads on the chopping block, so to speak, and put us, er I mean them, out of our, er I mean, their misery?

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There was a time when such bigoted sentiments would have led to shunning. People saw it for the naked bigotry that it is. No more.

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These attitudes permeate the elite and medical intelligentsia and are seeping into society. The only antidote is to say, "Not on my watch," and mean it.

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I write regularly for the Center for Bioethics and Culture Newsletter. This week, I have a piece on the new eugenics that threatens the lives and well being of the elderly and people with profound disabilities. Here is an excerpt:

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Around the world, profoundly disabled or terminally ill people are increasingly being seen as resource vampires that monopolize an undue share of medical attention that should be devoted to those with lives more worth living.

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Not only is the odious notion of infanticide gaining Establishment acceptance--with pro-infanticide bioethicist Peter Singer now at Princeton, and supportive pieces about euthanizing terminally ill and seriously disabled babies having been published in the New England Journal of Medicine , New York Times , and Los Angeles Times , among others---but also, a "duty to die" is gestating, beginning with Futile Care Theory in which hospital ethics committees are being empowered to allow doctors to refuse life-sustaining care based on their judgments about the quality of their patients' lives.

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This is nothing less than the rising of a "new eugenics" that perceives some lives as having greater value than others, and which in some cases sees death--including active euthanasia and assisted suicide--as an appropriate "solution" to the problems of human suffering.

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The original eugenics movement expressed this relativistic view of human life through hate-filled rhetoric; for example, eugenicists described disabled babies like [the Samoan baby] Miracle in terms that today would be considered hate speech.

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Thus, as recounted in Edwin Blacks' splendid history of eugenics, War Against the Weak , Margaret Sanger took "the extreme eugenic view that human 'weeds' should be 'exterminated.'"

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Today's new eugenicists are not that crass, of course. Indeed, rather than screaming hate and pejoratives from the rooftops, they instead ooze unctuous compassion as they croon about a "quality of life" ethic and preventing the weak--against whom they are secretly at war--from "suffering."

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But behind the politically correct language, and indeed, hiding within the hearts of those who perceive themselves as profoundly caring, lurks the same old disdain of the helpless who offend because they remind us of our own imperfections and mortality.

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