It’s back, all dressed up in new clothes, and slinking down the slippery slope in our direction.
The Final Solution, Hitler’s plan to exterminate the Jews, was not stopped by VE Day nearly sixty years ago. Now we learn that it was merely interrupted for a few decades. Today, The Final Solution rises from the slime of its own horror and slouches onto the world stage under the deceptive guise of medical efficiency.
The Groningen Protocol introduced in the Netherlands tries to paint a respectable face on cold-blooded murder. It allows a committee of doctors to decide if a mortally ill child, up to the age of twelve years, may live or die. Parents have no say in the medical verdict; this is a “professional” decision.
Hippocrates, the great Greek founder of medicine, must be flipping in his grave. And he's got plenty of company in the here-and-now, people all over the world who are appalled, outraged, and sorrowful that humanity has sunk to this travesty against life.
The Groningen Protocol sounds a bit like the title of an old Robert Ludlum novel, but the premise is more unbelievable than fiction. The idea of doctors calmly deciding to murder innocent babies has left me reeling with shock and bursting with questions. Have we truly forgotten, in the mere six decades since World War II, how incapable we humans are of handling the judgment of who among us should live and who should die? Do we honestly not realize that we are simply not up to this? Can we not accept that such power does not originate within us and that we have no claim to it?
The silence with which this new practice has been greeted is even more frightening. Have we reached a point where human life has become so cheap and meaningless that such evil actions as those embraced in the Netherlands do not merit the slightest whisper from mainstream media?
In the past generation, we have learned very well how to put our own interests before all else. An inconveniently-timed pregnancy ends in abortion, as carelessly as a toothache results in a trip to the dentist. How nonchalant we have become towards the miracle of life, how disrespectful, how selfish—how cold-blooded.
Dr. Suess tells us that “a person is a person, no matter how small.” And there is an old saying to the effect that “every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of men.”
He may not yet be discouraged of us, which is an amazing demonstration of Divine mercy. But I shudder to think what His justice will hold for the perpetrators of the Groningen Protocol.
