Europe Is Very Very Sick

It's nothing new for me to criticize European countries but sometimes the news out of the Old Continent truely frightens me.

Wesley Smith at the Weekly Standard is today talking about how the Dutch are now euthanizing children. He says:

For anyone paying attention to the continuing collapse of medical ethics in the Netherlands, this isn't at all shocking. Dutch doctors have been surreptitiously engaging in eugenic euthanasia of disabled babies for years, although it technically is illegal, since infants can't consent to be killed. Indeed, a disturbing 1997 study published in the British medical journal, the Lancet, revealed how deeply pediatric euthanasia has already metastasized into Dutch neo natal medical practice: According to the report, doctors were killing approximately 8 percent of all infants who died each year in the Netherlands. That amounts to approximately 80-90 per year. Of these, one-third would have lived more than a month. At least 10-15 of these killings involved infants who did not require life-sustaining treatment to stay alive. The study found that a shocking 45 percent of neo-natologists and 31 percent of pediatricians who responded to questionnaires had killed infants.

It took the Dutch almost 30 years for their medical practices to fall to the point that Dutch doctors are able to engage in the kind of euthanasia activities that got some German doctors hanged after Nuremberg. For those who object to this assertion by claiming that German doctors killed disabled babies during World War II without consent of parents, so too do many Dutch doctors: Approximately 21 percent of the infant euthanasia deaths occurred without request or consent of parents. Moreover, since when did parents attain the moral right to have their children killed?

I've always feared Europe's willingness to accept radical social and economic philosophies or programs. If you look around the majority of totalitarian and tyranical movements in the world are based on models developed in Europe.

For decades the world recoiled in horror at the crimes the Nazi's commited. Volumn's were written trying to explain how Germans and other sympathetic Europeans could accept the rationale to 'purify the race' or to 'eliminate the weak'.

And today Europe is slowly marching down the same well-trodden path to disaster. Killing children? How does a society rationalize this? What mechanism controls a society that says you can kill children based on 'what they would want if they could communicate it'? Is it wise for the state to convince it's population that it is OK to till the innocent and defenseless?

Europeans are slowly learning that life is meaningless and without consequence. I pity the rest of the world when they, as a people, fully absorb these lessons.