"When Doctors Want to Kill Handicapped Newborns"

[Denise_Shae]

A friend of mine e-mailed this article to me.

"When Doctors Want to Kill Handicapped Newborns"

Code: ZE06111421

Date: 2006-11-14

When Doctors Want to Kill Handicapped Newborns

Interview With Neonatologist Carlo Bellieni

SIENA, Italy, NOV. 14, 2006 (Zenit.org).- According to British press reports the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecology has asked that doctors be allowed to let seriously disabled newborns die.

The Royal College sent its request to the Nuffield Bioethics Council, the body in charge of examining the ethical issues involved in the new developments of biology and medicine. The latter, an influential private commission, is about to publish a report on critical decisions in fetal and neonatal medicine.

Opposition to the Royal College request has been expressed in the United Kingdom by the British Council of Disabled People.

To better understand the issue and its implications of a bioethical nature, ZENIT interviewed neonatologist Carlo Bellieni, director of the Neonatal Intensive Therapy Department of the Le Scotte University Polyclinic of Siena.

Q: What do you think of the request of the United Kingdom’s Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists?

Bellieni: The request to do away with newborns with serious disabilities, does not leave any pediatrician insensitive, namely, those who tomorrow will be called to carry out the “eliminations.”

But it is not new: Already in 2002 Michael Gross wrote in Bioethics that there is “a general endorsement of neonaticide subject to a parent’s assessment of the newborn’s interest broadly defined to consider physical harm as well as social, psychological and or financial harm to related third parties.”

And it is always by the “interest of third parties” that one begins to understand what might be hidden behind a pietistic intention “to put an end to the child’s sufferings.”

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I feel like human beings are going backwards, instead of forward.

Articles like this make me cringe.

[SIGN]My Jesus, Mercy![/SIGN]

God Bless!