Bad news for babies

An excellent article by Anthony McCarthy of the Linacre Centre, entitled Bad News for Babies, analyses the recently-publised report of the Nuffied Council "Critical care decisions in fetal and neonatal medicine: ethical issues." He argues that the report effectively endorses euthanasia by omission and that its stated case against active euthanasia is redered incoherent by its judgements about "intolerable human existence." In a chilling final paragraph, he says:

At the slick launch of the Report, I asked one of the authors, moral philosopher David Archard, whether he endorsed euthanasia by omission, and asked him whether he believed that there were lives not worthy of life. He said yes twice. Not only that, but he seemed rather shocked that anyone might disagree. This is worrying, especially as Archard is on record as saying that we ought to “deny the baseless and bogus rights of parents to dictate what is, and what is not, taught to their children”. As views such as these gain ascendancy, the culture of death quietly extends through our hospitals and schools. In the words of T.S. Eliot, “This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper.”