Pushing Infanticide.

Support for infanticide is becoming positively trendy. Where once support for killing babies born with birth defects was a fringe belief, it became respectableeven mainstreamafter doctors from Groningen University Medical Center in the Netherlands admitted in 2004 that they euthanized dying and profoundly disabled babies under the terms of what has come to be called the "Groningen Protocol."

The Protocol permits doctors to lethally inject three categories of sick or disabled newborn infants:

The baby has no chance of survival (which is sometimes misdiagnosed).

The baby "may survive after a period of intensive treatment but expectation for their future are very grim."

The baby does "not depend on technology for physiologic stability" but whose "suffering is severe, sustained, and cannot be alleviated."

This means that not only are dying babies lethally injected, but also babies with serious disabilities who do not need intensive care.

When news of the Protocol broke into the American newspapers, some of the most prestigious newspapers and professional journals leapt to its defense. Unsurprisingly, the charge was led by Princeton University's utilitarian bioethicist Peter Singer, who defended the Protocol in the Los Angeles Times, equating lethally injecting babies with withdrawing life-sustaining treatmenteven though some of the babies killed under Groningen did not require intensive care.