1962 - Euthanasia of severely disabled babies

I'm actually having this discussion with some other people on a different message board. Quite honestly, I see nothing wrong with euthanizing babies with severe mental disabilities - I mean, what kind of life is that going to be for them? I agree that it's wrong to keep a child that fucked up alive just to suffer, just as it would be to keep someone alive who is dying and in an extreme amount of pain. I know the stupid people will interpret that article as saying "We need to kill off everyone who has the slightest hint of a mental condition", but is it really humane to allow people who are severely screwed up to live? Why should a whole family get damned to caring for a diseased child? I mean, sure, they can stick it in foster care, but I find that to be the immature way out.

I do not advocate euthanizing everyone who has a problem, but I feel it should definitely be an option in worst-case scenarios, both in terms of physical and mental problems. It's more inhumane to allow someone to suffer through their lives than it is to put them out of their misery. But, since no one gives a flying fuck about the quality of life, euthanasia for humans will never be an option for those suffering the most.

Maybe it will be looked upon more seriously for the mentally screwed-up babies when parents get driven crazy and kill their precious little mental miracles.

I could not "pull the plug" on someone who is already into this life but I can understand the discussion and not get into an anger mode. However, I do feel it is inhumane to force a person to live under such awful health conditions. The taxpayer is also stuck with the bill as well.

I read an article awhile back of a severely autistic child who did not do well in public school. The boy was a terror at home threatening to kill his parents and other siblings. At night, he had to be locked in his room where he spread feces all over the place. The parents found a private school for the severely mentally disabled. The boy is thriving there but this costs a whopping $90,000USD annually.

The parents are now trying to get the public school system to pay with the attitude of how the school is supposed to have specialized education for the disabled. The school administration argues back how there are special ed classes but the breeders are adament that we act as a socialized nation and pick up the bill for the boy's boarding school.

I do feel sorry for the parents as they did not ask for this at all. But...it also bothers me that You-and-Me Taxpayer are expected to subsidize these people when many of our own people have zero health insurance and will go bankrupt if they had to get their appendix taken out.

Actually, what happens to this autistic boy when his parents grow old and want to retire or worse yet, die? How can he care for himself? Does he?

Why is it that our culture allows - nay, ENCOURAGES - people to put their animals to sleep when they are old and/or sick, but the same thing is considered murder when it involves a human sufferer? Why is it "humane" for animals but not for humans?

CFADinNYC Wrote:
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> Actually, what happens to this autistic boy when
> his parents grow old and want to retire or worse
> yet, die? How can he care for himself? Does he?

That was my question when I read this article. So many fellow/sister Americans scream of the evils of socialism but they will demand American Socialism for those babies and families. It is when the childfree-by-choice talk about universal health care for all, meaning people other than the subsidized breeders, is when the screaming against it begins. Other than that, we are expected to pick up the tab for every breeder and his/her consequences. The school system barely has money for the basics despite our taxes yet this moo and daddio find a loophole where they are trying to blackmail their local school system to pay for the autistic son's $90,000USD/yearly boarding school. I can imagine the screeching if someone mentioned that the kid should not have been born or euthanized...

I'll play the devil's advocate, since I am totally against anyone making health decisions except the person or the family involved if that person is unable to make their own decisions. Considering the current administration of the US, that's too frightening a slope to slide down.

My questions...
What is the litmus test for who is "too disabled" for life? Lots of folks are bringing up autism, which is relatively hard to diagnose, and doesn't necessicarly mean a person would be unable to function in society.
Would you agree to extending euthanasia to people who are severly injured, or become severly disabled due to illness at a later age? They could also be considered a burden to society.
Who makes that decision? The doctors? The government? A third "neutral" party? Are parents of severly disabled children given the option of allowing that child to die, like a family of a brain dead adult is?
What would the basis of that decision be? Would there be some sort of cost/benefit analsys? If we decide on cost/benefit analsys on each individual birth, couldn't that also be applicable to healthy adults? I know many perfectly healthy adults who take much more from society than they put back into it.

Just being difficult.

"It truly is the one commonality that every designation of humans you can think of has, there's at least one asshole."
--Me

I totally hear you, Feh. All of these are excellent questions. Who decides for who? I know I could not make that decision for another person. I also agree how many "able-bodied" people drain our society more than the disabled. This is a hard subject...

These questions are hardly new to the medical profession. We have been grappling with these issues since the first patient and the first doc fought over the bill!

Medical ethics are somewhat murky on the matter of quality of life. We are bound first by the principle of "primum non nocere", or "first, do no harm". Then comes informed consent and respect for the individual patient or authorized representative and the choices they make based on the first two. Some more recent ethicists add "advocate only that which is good for the patient", but this is, in my mind, only a reiteration and rhetorical reminder of "primum non nocere". These ethics become part of your professional DNA, to the point where you are a very different person when you walk out into professional life and start treating patients.

There is a huge gulf between a health professional's judgment and advice they will give to a patient and the hard and fast regulatory decision to mandate the withholding of certain treatments. Once you go down the road of legislating what is a quality of life, and trying to define it in any terms outside of the personal and subjective, you can put the patient's treatment choices at risk. This is distasteful to me as a health care professional, because it means society is willing to forego a fundamental pillar of ethics that form the bedrock of our practices, no matter what the scope or therapeutic modality.

Until we have done a better job of educating patients and authorized representatives on the alternatives and require all patients, of any age, to have written advanced directives prior to the start of care, I would not be in favor of trying to force the issue via the regulatory pathway. Given how screwed up our political processes are, I would certainly not feel comfortable putting a life or death decision, or any decision of that magnitude, in the hands of career or elected politicians. The prospect is too scary.

Feh, Dragon and Dan - I hear you and agree. Have you all seen these ads that are out for autism? That 1 in 167 will be diagnosed with this? It is more common than Down' Syndrome and childhood cancer. I don't know much about this disorder but in the boy mentioned above, he is voilent. Does that mean it manifests itself as violence in all who have this? At what age will these violent tendencies present themselves? Age 3? 4? How can we euthanize a child at that age?

And if we do euthannize at such a late age, I propose we euthanize or at least sterilize ALL family members so that their defectiveness does not get carried on. Can that be the criteria of the litmus test Feh is speaking of? How far can that go? I think it can become a tool to then decide those "less desirable" should also be euthanized. And anybody who has ever expressed themselves in an angry manner should also be euthanized. {TIC}

Why is it not humane to euthanize infants who present a disabillity? Because (and this is only my opinion) those who are disabled challenge within each of us our own humanity. Without defect, there can not be invention. Without need to care for those who were born less than perfect, we can not find within our selves to find humanity to care for them in dignified conditions. And to perhaps invent medical and educational systems that allow them to prevail over their disorder. Thank you, Hellen Keller.

The breeders who had that defective boy didn't ask for him to be "damaged" No one does. How can one prepare finacially for a $90k a year school bill? What if one of US became disabled? How is YOUR insurance? Do you have disabillity? You could be wiped out financially in 2 months time.

I think the system is corrupt and defunct (such as the above mentioned loophole). It wont be fixed in my lifetime.

The breeders who continue to breed and look as welfare as their "way to earn income" is a cultural belief that must be changed. They are the ones who are sponging off the system and our tax dollars. Furthermore, those women are not being encouraged to be MORE than just a welfare breeder. Where is the self-esteem in that? Why aren't they being encouraged to be more, to have more self respect? I feel for my fellow woman who lives through that environment. There is more out there than being a teen moo.

Ok, I've said enough.

the story is about the preborn ones, the ones born at 3 months, and have severe brain and body abnormalities. babies with hardly any brains, cant see, cant hear, cant experience life.

do we let these bags of protoplasm for thats what they really are exist and waste resources..

children severely disabled and would die if left alone, should we spend hundreds of hours trying to keep these kids alive, when they will only last a few years anyway.

thats the discussion the UK doctors want..

in the UK, if a dr decides that it would be kinder to let the kid die, then he can go to the courts, and plead his case, and the parents has to make their case. a lot of cases become n/R no resusictation if the kid starts to fail..

but its a matter that should be discussed, with the medical and legal people and the general public. WHICH they arent doing.

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I just post the stories, for interest.. for everyone

Lord, what fools these mortals be!
- A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act III, Scene ii

Voltaire said: "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

H.L.Mencken wrote:"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. Albert Einstein

Very good point, Cambion.

---

lab mom

I look at this from the same perspective that DrDan has. I will admit that I have not practiced in a standard ER/ICU/hospital nursing practice for a long time, we used to see patients and their families or partners struggling with the advanced directives.

The more these issues are raised in the legislatures and by the licensing boards, the less input seems to be sought from those of us who actually have to carry out their dictates. There is no consensus from other professionals because the noise level gets kicked up to just below an AC-DC concert. Kick me if you want to, but when you start writing laws that limit patient choices, you are opening a can of worms the size of Mount Everest. In the United States, we have never been able to make proper decisions concerning end of life matters without veering off into we vs. they arguments of religion. We tend to go way off the deep ends of the continuum and just keep digging ourselves in.

Congress and the state legislatures need to decide, once and for all, what the advanced directive requirements will be with input from those of us who would be expected to carry out the mandates. Stop pussy-footing around the issue and tackle it, and leave the fundies on both ends of the spectrum to wallow in their bullshit. With the boomer generation graying the population considerably, we can no longer afford to put the argument off.

Sorry to go philosophical on you, but I think we need to reach consensus after an informed, relevant national debate. The fundies of either polarity on the issue should just shut the fuck up.

Before the advancement of medicine these children simply would not have existed, they would have died at birth or shortly afterwards.

Because of the advances in medicine more and more of these profoundly sick children are being kept alive in constant pain and it is immoral, and they have no quality of life.

This is akin to the experiments on children which everyone stood back in horror when they heard of them.

yes cf thats the discussion that the british medical boards are wanting to have.. but a lot of people think it means euthanasia of otherwise healthy people, but its not that.. its as i have said babies so malformed and disabled that they will not have a life.. should all the resources be focused on keeping kids alive for 1 year more, in extreme pain. if you could save 2 people by letting 1 severely disabled baby die, who would normally die anyway, live would you do it thats the question the doctors have to ask themselves is is right for the parents to be so emotionally destroyed by seeing it die by inches, is it right for a child in severe chronic pain to live every day.

these are the questions that doctors should need to ask, regardles of religious beleifs.. religion should be banned from such decisions.

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I just post the stories, for interest.. for everyone

Lord, what fools these mortals be!
- A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act III, Scene ii

Voltaire said: "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

H.L.Mencken wrote:"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. Albert Einstein

Modern medicine definitely creates some problems, keeping people alive when it should not. That's one of the reasons I'm not sure where I stand on stem-cell testing...on one hand, it sucks that people have to have awful diseases, but on the other hand, our planet and evolution NEEDS people to die before there are too many people on the planet, esp. since people insist on breeding incessantly. We simply canNOT make it so that people don't die or so almost no one dies. It sounds cold to say that, "sorry you got this disease but you gotta die," but really, if we don't curb our medical advances so the population doesn't explode, I"m guessing Mother Nature will simply come up with a pandemic that goes beyond our medical knowledge to take of the problem that way.

thats the problem, your tinkering with evolution, if there is a genetic disease or disorder that occurs, that makes that persons life end sooner before breeding, then eventually a lot of those cases and future diseases will end.

the stronger the persons system, the better, if the weak died off then the next generation should be stronger.. the fit survive the weak dont..

but we have reached a plateau, we are playing god, should we have that power, to keep people alive that would naturally die. of course people would say its eugenics, and the nazi's did it.. selecting the best.. but what i am saying is sometimes for the good of society we let sick and ill people die, not by gassing them.

of course when you get to that stage, people will say you mean autistic, people with schizophrenia etc.. all i am saying is should we compound problems of the future by not letting natural selection take place..

now people will shout and rant about this, but extend the premise, people with fertility problems, and IVF, and the serial miscarries. nature has said to these people dont have kids, so they have them anyway, some with medical problems some not.. but should we play god.. having a kid isnt a medical need you wont die, so fund some extra research into causes of diseases.

*********************************************************************************************************************************
I just post the stories, for interest.. for everyone

Lord, what fools these mortals be!
- A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act III, Scene ii

Voltaire said: "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

H.L.Mencken wrote:"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. Albert Einstein

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-2451191,00.html

Sick babies can be left to die, Church says
By Dominic Kennedy and Ruth Gledhill


THE Church of England provoked shock yesterday by telling doctors’ ethical advisers that some sick babies should be allowed to die.
The Bishop of Southwark, the Right Rev Dr Tom Butler, said that the economic cost of long-term healthcare and education must be considered.

Going further than any mainstream Church leader has done before, the bishop said that there may be circumstances when it is morally acceptable to perform a “possibly lethal act”.

Dr Butler has submitted a paper to the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, a think-tank that advises on moral dilemmas created by scientific advances. The council — of clinicians, lawyers, philosophers, scientists and theologians — will publish guidance on Thursday about how to deal with very premature and very sick babies.

Medical advances now enable some babies to survive at 22 weeks gestation even when they are so premature that they could have been legally aborted at 24 weeks.

The bishop made his submission as public affairs’ vice-chairman for the Church’s Mission and Public Affairs Council. He said: “For a Christian, death is not the end, and is not to be avoided at all costs.”

The evangelical wing of the Church gave warning that the views were a slippery slope towards euthanasia, and the Roman Catholic Church issued a statement defending the right to life.

*********************************************************************************************************************************
I just post the stories, for interest.. for everyone

Lord, what fools these mortals be!
- A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act III, Scene ii

Voltaire said: "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

H.L.Mencken wrote:"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. Albert Einstein