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Thursday, December 02, 2004Barbarism, pure and simple...Hugh Hewitt has been spreading the word on the Groenigen protocol. This is the latest from the Netherlands, and it's a doozy. At issue is protocol for euthanizing people - including newborns and children - that can neither ask nor consent. As Hugh says, it's death by committee, with experts who know best deciding which lives are worth living. Libertarian in outlook, I have mixed feelings on euthanasia. Specifically, I think that folks of sound mind and decidedly unsound body can make that decision for themselves. I'm more nervous about somebody asking for euthanasia in, for example, a living will, because it's hard to say whether the person might not change his or her mind, such as it is, once circumstances warrant dealing with such questions. On abortion, as Hugh notes, there are a lot of questions. The TurkeyBlog is - shamefully - resolutely irresolute on this one. However, there is no need to debate fine lines, slippery slopes, etc. with Groenigen. This is not about a person who wants to die needing help. Or about when the stuff of human DNA becomes fully and completely human. This is about a person or group of people deciding to snuff out a human life that is, in fact, existent in our sphere of life. Where I come from, it's referred to as murder-one. Hugh is right to be pushing this issue, and right to call for people to take a position on a very serious question - what life is worthy of being lived? Right now, there are certain elements in the Middle East that believe that the only life worth living is a Muslim one - of a particular variety. This belief equates the extinction of Western lives with spiritual cleansing. While the Dutch may have come up with reasons more pleasing to our aesthetic sense of life, they're in the same biz, picking which humans are and aren't worthy of life. In both cases, it's ugly, evil and to be stopped. 
posted by gbarto at 10:00 PM |
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