Infant Euthenasia

[blike]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4093965.stm

 

Doctors in the Netherlands are calling for new laws allowing them to end the lives of newborn babies with intolerable and incurable illnesses.

 

What do you guys think about this?

[sepultallica]

im surprised it isnt legal. yeah, the vatican is of course against that document. those guys are human beings. they just cant admit that it would be better to kill em off.

 

also, humans can be born without brains?

[john5746]

Only 600 worldwide - seems to be a very narrow application, but it does open the door...

 

Baby with no brain - what do they do, keep it plugged up to a machine so that it can suffer? Seems like you would end the suffering quickly.

 

Seems like a no brainer to me.

[sepultallica]

Only 600 worldwide - seems to be a very narrow application' date=' but it does open the door...

 

Baby with no brain - what do they do, keep it plugged up to a machine so that it can suffer? Seems like you would end the suffering quickly.

 

Seems like a no brainer to me.[/quote']

 

no pun intended?

[Aardvark]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4093965.stm

 

Doctors in the Netherlands are calling for new laws allowing them to end the lives of newborn babies with intolerable and incurable illnesses.

 

What do you guys think about this?

 

The main moral distinction as far as i see it is the difference between killing and alowing to die.

 

I'm not certain from this link where the Dutch stand on that distinction.

 

Allowing a seriously ill, incurable baby to die is ,in my opinion, acceptable, but to actively kill it is a different matter.

[john5746]

Yes, I wonder how long a baby without a brain can live without any extraneous help. Still, I think it more humane to kill than to allow someone to suffer.

[Aardvark]

Yes, I wonder how long a baby without a brain can live without any extraneous help. Still, I think it more humane to kill than to allow someone to suffer.

 

I'm a bit nervous about a slippery slope here. Who decides that someones life is intolerable? How is the decision reached?

 

Putting that kind of decision in the hands of a government bueacracy does not fill me with confidence.

 

At the very least the burden of evidence should be totally overwhelming that the life is completely and absolutely intolerable before i could countance a mercy killing.

 

And on this matter i think we should avoid euphermisms. They are words intended to allow us to avoid the reality of our actions. To keep us honest we should us the direct words. For instance state out openly that it is necessary 'to kill the baby', rather than 'euthanise the subject'.

[Auk]

I really don't know what to think. I find that if the baby will be suffering all it's life it is a sensible act but you have to make a clear distinction as to what the rules will be if the law is accepted. They should very strict and only allow this in extreme conditions.

[TimeTraveler]

If the baby was going to die regardless and it would only suffer if it remained alive, then maybe.

 

But I am with Aardvark, who decides?

[Ophiolite]

I formed the impression, from a myriad of small remarks, that there was a time when some, perhaps many, doctors and midwifes would quietly end the life (sorry, Aardvark - would deliberately kill) of a badly deformed child and report to the parents it had died stillborn.

I suspect this practice is still followed in 'primitive' cultures today. If you are a hunter-gatherer living a subsistence lifestyle you become a pragmatist.

Can anyone comment on the veracity of these notions.

[kingjewel1]

It's important to realise that in nature that badly deformed infants are ostracised by the pack and left defenseless to die. It is also relevant to this topic that had the mother of mozart decided to have an abortion because he was terminally ill... one of the greatest musically talented minds in the world would never have come to fruition. Where would you stop? This is similar to predicting the future. Leave it up to God all mighty to decide when to take his children.

 

As you say, in centuries gone by there were no means to artificially keep a baby alive, it simply died. Now we are landed with the choice... One way or the other it is wrong. Wrong to let it live, but wrong to let die. Political policy will eventually rule in favour of some cases. It comes in the end.

[husmusen]

In post #3 john wrote

 

"Yes, I wonder how long a baby without a brain can live without any extraneous help. Still, I think it more humane to kill than to allow someone to suffer."

 

? How does it perceive pain without a nervous system and hence suffer.

? How then would allowing it to simply die be 'cruel'.

[sepultallica]

If the baby was going to die regardless and it would only suffer if it remained alive' date=' then maybe.

 

But I am with Aardvark, who decides?[/quote']

 

i would also ask who gets to decide and how do we make it so that the acts arent politically motivated.

 

i could be wrong about this, but i think that county coroners and chief medical examiners are elected officials in the US. im sure there's already boards of physicians but establish one specifically for this purpose. make them elected officials. obviously the legislature they follow would of course have to come from politicians and law makers. but you can make legislature read any way you want. you can make a case for anything. so it's more of how these elected officials will use the law.

[john5746]

In post #3 john wrote

 

"Yes' date=' I wonder how long a baby without a brain can live without any extraneous help. Still, I think it more humane to kill than to allow someone to suffer."

 

? How does it perceive pain without a nervous system and hence suffer.

? How then would allowing it to simply die be 'cruel'.[/quote']

 

Good point. So, if IT feels no pain or pleasure, then why try to keep IT alive? Why make the women carry IT?

[ecoli]

In post #3 john wrote

 

"Yes' date=' I wonder how long a baby without a brain can live without any extraneous help. Still, I think it more humane to kill than to allow someone to suffer."

 

? How does it perceive pain without a nervous system and hence suffer.

? How then would allowing it to simply die be 'cruel'.[/quote']

 

 

I'm pretty sure it was a theorhetical question. Obviously a baby could never be born without a brain, it would be an inanimate object, and never have been alive in order to die.

[Giacomo525]

When infants are born "brainless", they aren't literally born with no brain, just a very small, and oft not working brain. Usually the parts that don't work are the frontal lobe, most of the cerebellum, and IIRC the brain stem only to a certain degree.

 

It would be better that they be not born.

[ecoli]

Then why do they call it "brainless"?

[husmusen]

If the brainstem isn't working then it's unlikely anything else is either.

It's death is

a) Imminent.

b) Unavoidable by any means known to man.

c) No sensory conduction, so no pain?

 

To me this situation sounds like 'should we

perform euthinasia on the twitching body of someone who's just been

decapitated'.

[Glider]

Anencephallic infants are born now and again. This condition manifests on a contunuum, showing anything from a severely underdeveloped (rudimentary) brain, to complete absence of anything higher than the brainstem. Generally, infants with anencephaly do not survive for long without the aid of life-support.

[Artorius]

Just on the subject of 'brainless'.

 

I watched a documentary about a year or so ago.Basically modern science accepts BSD with no possible reversal and after discussion with family etc.The patient is allowed to die etc.This based on what we think we know of the brain.

However this documentary was of two ladies one US and the other UK who went for a scan due to some other ailment.What transpired was that these women had very little brain.It was basically a bag of fluid with a thin outer layer of brain tissue.Other than a few sight problems these people functioned quite normally.

What im saying is maybe at birth the brain which is defective later develops in what ever space is granted to it.Could not these babies now being born brains develop at a later stage into a functional person.

[In My Memory]

The situation is almost identical to the books written by Princeton professor of Bioethics, Peter Singer, on the ethics of killing human beings.

 

Singer's views are very non-traditional, but he backs up what he has to say fairly well (even if what he says contradicts all manner of intuition). Here is a short excerpt Singer's book Taking Human Lives specifically on the topic of infant euthanasia:

Life and Death Decisions for Disabled Infants

 

If we were to approach the issue of life or death for a seriously disabled human infant without any prior discussion of the ethics of killing in general, we might be unable to resolve the conflict between the widely accepted obligation to protect the sanctity of human life, and the goal of reducing suffering.

 

... In Chapter 4 we saw that the fact that a being is a human being, in the sense of a member of the species Homo sapiens, is not relevant to the wrongness of killing it; it is, rather, characteristics like rationality, autonomy, and self-consciousness that make a difference. Infants lack these characteristics. Killing them, therefore, cannot be equated with killing normal human beings, or any other self-conscious beings. This conclusion is not limited to infants who, because of irreversible intellectual disabilities, will never be rational, self-conscious beings. We saw in our discussion of abortion that the potential of a fetus to become a rational, self-conscious being cannot count against killing it at a stage when it lacks these characteristics - not, that is, unless we are also prepared to count the value of rational self-conscious life as a reason against contraception and celibacy. No infant - disabled or not - has as strong a claim to life as beings capable of seeing themselves as distinct entities, existing over time.

 

... Infants are sentient beings who are neither rational nor self- conscious. So if we turn to consider the infants in themselves, independently of the attitudes of their parents, since their species is not relevant to their moral status, the principles that govern the wrongness of killing non-human animals who are sentient but not rational or self-conscious must apply here too. As we saw, the most plausible arguments for attributing a right to life to a being apply only if there is some awareness of oneself as a being existing over time, or as a continuing mental self. Nor can respect for autonomy apply where there is no capacity for autonomy. The remaining principles identified in Chapter 4 are utilitarian. Hence the quality of life that the infant can be expected to have is important.

Singer is the first and only person I've ever known to make a serious case on the ethics of taking the lives of diabled infants. However, it is far too easy to take what Singer has to say out of context and make it seem like he wants to kill all disabled babies, I *strongly* urge anyone to read what Singer has to say for himself before criticizing him.

 

And on this matter i think we should avoid euphermisms. They are words intended to allow us to avoid the reality of our actions. To keep us honest we should us the direct words. For instance state out openly that it is necessary 'to kill the baby', rather than 'euthanise the subject'.

In the technical sense, I think euthanasia is the more direct and succinct choice of words. It is specifically distinguished from other types of killing because A brings about the death of B, for the sake of B.

 

I formed the impression' date=' from a myriad of small remarks, that there was a time when some, perhaps many, doctors and midwifes would quietly end the life (sorry, Aardvark - would deliberately kill) of a badly deformed child and report to the parents it had died stillborn.

I suspect this practice is still followed in 'primitive' cultures today. If you are a hunter-gatherer living a subsistence lifestyle you become a pragmatist.

Can anyone comment on the veracity of these notions.[/quote']

If I remember correctly, in the ancient Greek culture, there was a tradition to determine the citizenship of severely handicapped infants. It involved exposing the infant to the side of a mountain for 28 days - if the infant lived after that point then it could be considered a full member of society. Very cruel practice.

[coquina]

My mother had a seamstress who had a severely disabled child. She was born that way, from anoxia during birth. She was but in an incubator and suffered blindness. She couldn't eat, so they put a gastric tube in her stomach.

 

Her mother and father cared for her 24/7, and she never said so much as "ma ma" or "da da". (The father worked outside the home, the mother became a seamstress so that she could work at home and be available to take care of her daughter.)

 

When the child was 11, the father met someone else and bailed. I guess he paid child support, but he could not live anymore the way he and his wife had lived for over a decade. When my mother died in 2003, the woman was still taking care of the child who was in her teens. Somehow, she had managed to survive without contracting pneumonia or a staph infection. I have lost contact with the woman, but I expect that if the child still lives, she is still caretaking.

 

In my humble opinion, that child should have been allowed to die. She would have, without intervention. The parents should have been told she was still born. She lived, in a vegetative state, but in doing so, she killed her parents.

[Glider]

I agree with you.