Life Unworthy of Life?

An article admitting and advocating infanticide in the Netherlands, recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine, will shock anyone unacquainted with Dutch medical practice. The Dutch authors, Drs. Eduard Verhagen and Pieter Sauer, sanguinely defend the apparently widespread Dutch practice of killing infants deemed "life unworthy of life."

Of course, that's not the phrase the respectable Dutch doctors used. That's what the Nazis called it.

Drs. Verhagen and Sauer advocate in their Journal article the killing of "newborns who have serious disorders or deformities associated with suffering that cannot be alleviated and for whom there is no hope of improvement."

That's pretty much how the Nazis put it, too.

In October 1939, Hitler issued an order expanding "the authority of certain physicians to be designated by name in such manner that persons who, according to human judgment, are incurable can, upon a most careful diagnosis of their condition of sickness, be accorded a mercy death."

Code named "Aktion T 4," the Nazi euthanasia program to eliminate "life unworthy of life" targeted for death by injection or gradual starvation any newborns and children through age three who showed symptoms of mental retardation or physical deformity. The Nazi euthanasia program quickly expanded to include older disabled children and adults. Newly erected gas chambers and crematoriums in six euthanasia centers promoted the chilling lethal efficiency that would become the hallmark of the Holocaust.

Dutch euthanasia doctors, of course, vehemently reject any comparison to the Nazis. Nor would they appreciate a comparison to the euthanasia doctors of ancient Greece and Rome. In those ancient days, doctors and politicians alike exterminated infants, the elderly, and the infirm with impunity. Such practices can only persist with cultural endorsement, and prominent Greek and Roman philosophers propped up the rampant euthanasia with utilitarian justifications not unlike Darwin's doctrine of the survival of the fittest.