Pushing Infanticide: From Holland to New Jersey.

Bureaucracy has trumped morality in the Netherlands. How else can one explain a country where, when doctors admit publicly that they commit eugenic infanticide, the leaders' response is not to prosecute them for murder, but instead to urge that guidelines be created under which future baby killings can openly take place?

The "Groningen Protocol"named after a pediatric hospital which admittedly permits doctors to end the lives of babies born with disabilities or terminal conditionsseeks to normalize infanticide by bringing the practice out of the shadows and into the light of day. Under this thinking, it isn't the killing that is wrong, but the secrecy.

Secrecy? What secrecy? It has been widely known for years that Dutch doctors kill disabled and dying babies. As far back as 1992, the Dutch Royal Society of Medicine published guidelines to be used in deciding whether to kill a baby, including whether the child would ever be able to live independently, experience "self realization" (being able to hear, read, write, labor), and have meaningful interpersonal relations.

By 1993, as documented in PBS's Choosing Death, three out of eight neonatal intensive care unites in the Netherlands had specific policies, endorsed by the Dutch Pediatric Society, that permitted infanticide by lethal injection. In 1996, the Lancet published a study finding that 8% of all Dutch infant deaths each yearbetween 80 and 100result from lethal injections, many without parental consent. I wrote about the matter extensively in my 1997 book Forced Exit.

No, the publishing of the Groningen Protocol isn't designed to end the secret that is not a secret. It is intended to legitimize eugenic infanticide and move it from a crime tolerated by the oh-so-tolerant Dutch to outright legality. In other words, the last vestige of protection left in the Netherlands against infanticidethat is, the technical illegality of killing babiesis to be stripped away, including the protection against the killing of disabled infants not dependent on intensive care for survival.

Murdering babies because they are disabled or dying is a profound violation of their human rights. At least, it used to be. After all, many German doctors who killed disabled infants during World War II were hung for their crimes.

This belief appears to be changing, at least among elites. As a consequence, an effort appears to be under way to spread the Dutch cancer to our own shores. The New England Journal of Medicine, for example, recently provided a forum for two Dutch doctors to explain dispassionately how the Groningen Protocol seeks "to ...