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Catholic World News News Feature

Dutch doctor admits to lethally injecting 4 newborns April 29, 2005

The UK news magazine The Evening Standard reported on Thursday that a Dutch doctor admitted to having euthanized disabled newborns. Dutch pediatrician Eduard Verhagen is in the forefront of a push to have the euthanasia of infants made legal in order to protect doctors who are already doing it. He admitted that he had given lethal injections to four babies born with spina bifida, a condition that is sometimes correctable by pre-natal surgery.

Verhagen said, "All four babies had spina bifida-- not the usual type, but severely affected children where this was not the only problem. They were in constant pain. In the last minutes or seconds you see the pain relax and they fall asleep ... at the end, after the injection, their fists unclench and there is relief for everyone in the room. Finally they get what they should have been given earlier."

However, doctors who specialize in pain treatment have repeatedly pointed out that new pain control medications have effectively eliminated the pretext of uncontrollable pain as an excuse for euthanasia.

Verhagen, who works at Groningen University Medical Center, is one of a group of doctors who has proposed what is being called the Groningen Protocol to decide how much a child has to be suffering to be considered worthy of being killed by lethal injection. In a recent interview on National Public Radio, Verhagen said, "We felt that in these children the most humane course of action would be to allow the child to die, and even actively assist them in their death .... And in extreme cases, the best way to protect life is to sometimes assist a little bit in death."

Peter Singer, a professor of bioethics at Princeton University in New Jersey, was a pioneer in the advocacy for infanticide. Singer's seminal book, "Practical Ethics," laid out a scheme where human beings must earn their "personhood" and can lose it if they are disabled, elderly or otherwise "useless" or incapacitated. In traditional ethics, a "person" is a living human being. But the new bioethics is opening the medical establishment to the idea, based on the philosophical model of utilitarianism, that human beings are merely disposable biological machines.

The utilitarian principle is being fully realized in Holland where legalized euthanasia has left many people afraid to go to hospitals. Rumors and more reliable firsthand reports have been common for years of Dutch people carrying cards that ask hospital staff not to kill them. Some report that they prefer to go to Germany or Belgium for medical treatment.

In many countries the issue of legalizing euthanasia, with "safeguards" based on the Dutch model, is being openly debated, with many in the medical profession advocating in its favor.

Verhagen summed up the eugenics/bioethics principle saying, "Death can be more humane than continued life if (life) involves extreme suffering."