A Pro-Life Article in an Unusual Place

I was flipping through Forbes Magazine the other day (I have an eclectic choice of reading material) and was surprised to come across an editorial by Steve Forbes titled "HitlerCare."

Belgium is on its way to allowing doctors, with parental consent, to kill children deemed to be afflicted with “constant and unbearable physical suffering.” The kids must also sign off on this, as if a child has the capacity to reason like an adult.

We are on the malignantly slippery slope to becoming a society like that envisioned by Nazi Germany, one in which “undesirables” are disposed of like used tissue. While the Nazis carried this ideology of death to its ghastly logical conclusion, the belief that it would be good for the human race to improve itself–as breeders do with horses, dogs, cows and other animals and plants–was also widespread in numerous other countries before WWII, including the U.S. It was called eugenics, and under its banner countless hundreds of thousands of people, particularly those deemed mentally handicapped, were forcibly sterilized to prevent them from fathering or birthing children. Before the war Nazi Germany killed upwards of 8,000 children judged to be “mentally deficient” or incurably ill.. . .

As euthanasia becomes more accepted–and we become more numb to the horror of murdering people like this–we’ll descend to the next abomination: pressuring the sick to discontinue treatment for a likely fatal illness in the name of “saving scarce resources” for people who have more years ahead of them. After all, an enormous percentage of medical costs are wracked up by people who have less than six months to live. Britain already has its own version of a death panel, which has a formula for determining who gets expensive treatment and who doesn’t.

Let’s be clear. We’re not talking about adults deciding they don’t want “heroic” methods applied when they’re suffering a fatal illness; we’re talking about the conscious taking of a life by people who are trained to cure us of illness.

The true mark of a civilization is in how it treats its most vulnerable members.

Thank you, Mr. Forbes.