Current mood:	irate
Current music:	Disposable Heroes

Grah.
Now a while ago I decided to show a little consideration for those americans in my audience that didn't like some darn furrner bitch about their country and use LJ-cuts and proper disclaimers to warn them when something pissed me off.

However, after reading this particular piece of hypocritical bullshit, I've decided to dispence with the niceties for a change.

Let me spell it out for you: Yes, the Netherlands does indeed have laws defining under which circumstances the euthanasia of infants is permissible. From memory, those circumstances have to include multiple expert opinions that yes, this child is suffering from terminal, painful and above all, incurable ailments (usually birth defects so catastrophic that they defy surgical correction and severely impair the child's ability to live independent of life support for any length of time) as well as informed consent of the child's parents. And even then, every single detail that could possibly be relevant to the case has to be documented and the doctor that performed the euthanasia has to explain the case to a review board afterwards.

This is done so that when a child doctor is faced with two emotional shipwrecks and a baby that more closely requires an abstract clay sculpture done by picasso on an LSD trip that needs to be permanently hooked up to five machines just to live for more than a handful of minutes, has a set of guidelines to steer by and decide when the part of his Hippocratic oath where he swore to preserve life stops taking precedence over the part of that oath where he also swore to alleviate suffering wherever he could, and to not make that kind of terrible choice any more diffucult and painful than it already is by automatically slapping him with a murder charge.

Now, of course, as was recently proven, a majority of Americans has no patience with anything that isn't perfectly black and white and doesn't want to believe in the possibility that some issues are more complex than can be fitted into a five-word catch phrase that sounds good as a headline. So I really shouldn't be surprised that the bigot-and-imbecile brigades of Focus On The Family (Or as I'm starting to refer to them, Fart on the Facts) jumped on this in full hysteria mode and got it wrong.

Here's a quote from one of their resident "experts":

Carrie Gordon Earll, bioethics policy analyst at Focus on the Family, said she thinks the U.S. medical community strongly opposes newborn euthanasia but that some cases have occurred.

"If they're done under cover and secret ... they should be prosecuted," she said. "This is not the Netherlands and we should not be on a slippery slope to baby infanticide."

I shouldn't bother to poke fun at the redundancy in "baby infanticide" when I have a larger issue to address, but what kind of 'policy analyst' can you be if you can't even get your terminology straight?

Besides, that's not what I'm upset about. Allow me to lift another quote from the same article to illustrate:

In the United States, some doctors and ethicists -- both supporters and opponents of euthanasia -- say newborn euthanasia has happened occasionally for decades, although it is much more common, and accepted, to withhold or stop intensive treatment and let the baby die.

So to summarize: It's aborrent and immoral and vile to quickly and painlessly end a life that was doomed to know nothing but pain and suffering, but it's perfectly acceptable to turn away and tell a pair of already-greaving parents that you're going to leave their child to slowly starve and/or suffocate in its own time?

I guess I was mistaken. This isn't about the bible (with the possible exception of Matthew 27:24)so much as it is about hypocrisy covering up moral cowardice. Of course, it's your country, and far be it from me to tell you how to live your life, but kindly shut the fuck up with the "culture of death" hysteric hyperbole just because our political leaders can at least occasionally get their heads out of their asses far enough to recognize that inaction is also an action and when to let people who have spent a significant amount of their lives training do the job they trained for the best they know how.

I think that pretty much covers what I had to say about this.

Peace, all.