The murder of unwanted infants was a practice so common in ancient pagan societies that sociologist Stefan Timmerman claims, “Humans in every society studied to date are more likely to be murdered on the day they are born than on any other day of their lives.” The exposure of infants was justified by law and supported by the people to such a degree that Roman historian Cornelius Tacitus thought the Jews sinister and revolting for their opposition to killing infants. Both Aristotle and Plato recommended the practice. Yet the early Christians joined the Jews in condemning the practice as immoral, calling it murder. Their persistence paid off when infanticide was outlawed by Emperor Valentinian, a Christian, in the 4th century.

As the West loses some of its Biblical moral footing there is a new effort to decriminalize infanticide.

In ancient Rome, babies born with disabilities or serious illnesses were often exposed on hills, a barbaric practice that was eventually stopped when (and because) Christianity became the Empire's official religion. 

Alas, killing babies born with birth defects is making a comeback in our Post Christian times.  Indeed, support for infanticide is not only gaining respectability among the bioethics and medical intelligentsia—it is becoming positively trendy. 

Princeton University's Peter Singer deserves much of the blame for this change.  Back when infanticide support was still an anathema, Singer began advocating for the right of parents to kill unwanted newborns.  He didn't put it that starkly, of course.  He always used the example of babies born with serious disabilities such as Down syndrome.  Thus, he wrote on page 213 of 1994 his book Rethinking Life and Death:

To have a child with Down syndrome is to have a different experience from having a normal child…For some parents, none of this matters.  They find bringing up a child with Down syndrome a rewarding experience in a thousand different ways. But for other parents, it is devastating.

Both for the sake of 'our children,' then, and for our own sake, we may not want a child to start life's uncertain voyage if the prospects are clouded. When this is known at a very early stage of the voyage we may still have a chance to make a fresh start.  This means detaching ourselves from the infant who has been born, cutting ourselves free before the ties that have already begun to bind us to our child have become irresistible. Instead of going forward and putting all our efforts into making the best of the situation, we can still say no, and start again from the beginning.

Singer is a master of using passive language and euphemisms to mask the brutality of what he advocates. But make no mistake, his phrases, "detaching ourselves," and choosing to "start again from the beginning," refer to baby killing.

Alas, Peter Singer is no longer alone.  After doctors from Groningen University Medical Center in the Netherlands admitted in 2004 that they euthanized dying and profoundly disabled babies under what has come to be called the "Groningen Protocol," support for infanticide appeared in some of this country's most prestigious professional journals and newspapers.  Unsurprisingly, the charge was led by Singer, who defended the Protocol in the Los Angeles Times.  ("Pulling Back the Curtain on the Mercy Killing of Newborns," March 11, 2005)

But it didn't stop there.  On March 19, 2005, the New York Times carried a highly sympathetic report about the Protocol, "A Crusade Born of a Suffering Infant's Cry,"   a puff profile of one of the leaders of the Dutch infanticide movement, Dr. Eduard Verhagen, "a father of three who spent years tending to sick children in underdeveloped countries." The article laments, "For his efforts to end what he calls their unbearable and incurable suffering, Dr. Verhagen has been called Dr. Death, a second Hitler and worse — mostly by American opponents of euthanasia." Poor baby.

On March 10, 2005, the New England Journal of Medicine lent its prestige to two Dutch doctors, allowing them to explain dispassionately to Journal readers how the Groningen Protocol seeks "to develop norms" for infanticide.

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. Moreover, even if undertaken in good faith, Dutch euthanasia guidelines for adults and teenagers have continually been violated without legal consequence for decades, and so why would any rational observer expect anything different from infanticide regulations?  Even the authors understand that mistakes will happen and, typical of the mindset, assume that if murder of the helpless is committed in front of an open window it is somehow more acceptable:

Determining in an instant case whether the protocol is applicable will always require judgment, and because the stakes are inordinately high no matter what is decided, the judgment must be made with fear and trembling. That said, however, we believe that transparency in the deliberations concerning the ending of an infant's life--which is just as important as it is in the deliberations concerning euthanasia in adults--is adequately promoted by the protocol's requirements.

It wasn't many years ago that almost everyone accepted that infanticide is intrinsically and inherently wrong. Clearly, this is no longer true. With growth of personhood theory that denies the intrinsic value of human life, and with the invidiously discriminatory "quality of life" utilitarian 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.

Lethal prescriptions: Peter Singer's flawed Ethics

But it is Singer's 1996 Rethinking Life and Death: The Collapse of Our Traditional Ethics that has triggered the most controversy. In it, Singer throws down the gauntlet to all who proscribe the direct killing of innocent people. As a "new commandment," he asks us to "recognize that the worth of human life varies." Actual persons, in contrast to merely biological members of the human species, are distinguished, he says, by their capacities for rationality, self-awareness, and social relations. On that basis, Singer denies personhood to fetuses, newborns, and severely disabled adults. Parents should be able, therefore, to euthanize a "seriously" handicapped newborn. In the book, Singer sets the limit for such parental decisions at twenty-eight days after birth, but more recently he has recommended extending that cutoff point "somewhat short of one year."

What, for Singer, qualifies as a serious defect? He mentions spina bifida, hemophilia, and Down syndrome as conditions that, at the parents' discretion, warrant lethal prescriptions. As a good utilitarian, Singer pledges primary allegiance to the reduction of suffering, but, in the case of Down syndrome, such "logic" hardly seems applicable to the infant itself. Singer focuses, instead, on the parents. As actual persons, unlike their newborn, their dashed hopes should suffice to justify euthanasia. This conclusion amounts to a "replacement" thesis. The defective infant, as a nonperson, may be replaced by a healthier brother or sister born at some later date, with a net positive value to the parents in the satisfaction of their preferences.

Commonweal Foundation

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1252/is_7_132/ai_n15660322

The emergence of infanticide in the Netherlands is not something new arising, but something very old.

Infanticide was quite common practice in almost all ancient societies. Infant sacrifice was widespread in Central and South America. In Inca civilization, children were routinely sacrificed in times of war and political upheaval in an attempt to propitiate the gods and gain their favor.

In ancient Carthage, for example, infants were sacrificed to the god Moloch. The child was placed into the outstretched hands of the god’s statue, and by a mechanical device, he was dumped into a waiting fire.

In ancient Greece the exposure of unwanted infants was widely practiced. The warrior city of Sparta demanded that all deformed children should be exposed or used as slaves. Athenians also practiced infanticide, but only before the tenth day after birth.

In Rome, the father had absolute right over the lives of his children, the right of pater familias. When children were born, the father was brought in immediately. If he lifted up the child, it was a sign that he accepted it. If not, the child was exposed, left either to die or to be picked up by the slave trade. Indeed, Rome’s most famous legal document, the Twelve Tables, demanded that deformed children be put to death: Cito necatus insignis ad deformitatem puer esto, “A noticeably deformed child shall quickly be killed” (Table IV).

The Jews were one of the great exceptions in the ancient world, as the constant criticism of Moloch in the Bible attests, and Christianity inherited and strengthened the ban against infanticide. The earliest non-New Testament document of Christianity, the Didache, explicitly prohibits abortion and infanticide: “You shall not slaughter a child in abortion nor slay a begotten one.

What can we gather from this historical vantage in assessing the rise of infanticide in the Netherlands? Infanticide was widely practiced in the ancient world until the west became Christianized. Now that it’s becoming de-Christianized, infanticide is coming back. Pagans never change.

Benjamin Wiker

Infant euthanasia was once seen unequivocally for the evil that it is

In 1949, Dr. Leo Alexander—who investigated the medical crimes of the Holocaust from the murder of people with disabilities to atrocious human experimentation—wrote a prophetic warning about the presence of euthanasia attitudes in our own midst.
"Whatever proportions these crimes [euthanasia of the disabled in Germany] finally assumed, it became evident to all who investigated them that they started from small beginnings. The beginnings at first were merely a subtle shift in emphasis in the basic attitudes of physicians. It started with the acceptance of the attitude basic to the euthanasia movement, that there is such a thing as a life not worthy to be lived."

New England Journal of Medicine/1949

http://www.restoringourheritage.com/articles/nej_medicaldictatorship.pdf

D'Souza Debates Singer

April 25th debate with Peter Singer.
Venue: Biola University, 7:00 pm

More details to follow.

"We have been taught that it is wicked to expose even newly-born children."

Justin Martyr
First Apology (250 CE)

"And I see that you at one time expose your begotten children to wild beasts and to the birds; at another that you crush when strangled with a miserable kind of death. . . . And these things assuredly come down from your gods. For Saturn did not expose his children but devoured them."

Christian writer Minucius Felix, to Emperor Claudius

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