Toronto March for Life“Now I know the full power of evil. It makes ugliness seem beautiful and goodness seem ugly and weak.” So writes author August Strindberg in his aptly named novel The Dance of Death.
I cannot think of a more accurate description of the controversy that erupted this week over an editorial published in the disingenuously titled publication The Journal of Medical Ethics. The editorial was entitled “After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?” This piece essentially advocated for the legalized euthanasia of any or all newborns due to the purported fact that “both fetuses and newborns do not have the same moral status as actual persons [and] the fact that both are potential persons is morally irrelevant.”
You heard correctly. The status of both pre-born and born children, according to these wolves in ethicists’ clothing, is “morally irrelevant.” Indeed, when defending the publication of this blood-stained proposal, the editor Julian Saveulescu iterates that “the goal of the Journal of Medical Ethics is not to present the Truth or promote some one moral view.” He then goes on in blissful ignorance of titanic irony that those who protested vociferously against this editorial were guilty of “hate speech” that could “incense people to violence.” Apparently when it comes to his right to free speech and to incense violence against younger members of the human family, Mr. Saveulescu discovers a refreshing moral rigidity to lean upon. That, ladies and gentlemen, is what ethics look like when the antiquated ideas of “Truth” and “morals” are surgically removed with a secular suction hose.
Both the editorial in question and the response of the estimable Mr. Saveulescu also reveal a fact that is unknown to many: That in the Netherlands, infanticide is widely practiced. The 2002 Groningen Protocol allows “doctors” to “actively terminate the life of infants with a hopeless prognosis who experience what parents and medical experts deem to be unbearable suffering.” Unbearable suffering, incidentally, is not defined here as having parents who think that a child who is less than physically perfect is worthless.
This one really hits home for me. As my last name indicates, I come from a Dutch heritage. Both my maternal and my paternal grandparents were born in the Netherlands, as well as my father. I attend a very culturally Dutch church. And my grandparents still remember World War II vividly, when their fellow countrymen, Jewish and otherwise, were gunned down in the streets by Nazi death-mongers who had taken it upon themselves to decide who was human and who was not.
And barely sixty years later, the land of my forebears doesn’t need a devilish invader to tear Dutch children like Anne Frank from their beds. Instead, they have decided to indulge in their own dance of death. Germans deciding which Dutch people should live is an abomination. Dutch people deciding for other Dutch people, apparently, is a right. In the Netherlands, you are only safe if you’re healthy. The Grim Reaper waits patiently for the pre-born, the newborns, the disabled, and the elderly. If you’re Jewish, you’re safe. If you’re Jewish but disabled, it might not make a difference to you which decade you’re born in.
If this is not a call to action for my fellow Dutch Canadians, and for the Canadians who can learn from the hellish mistakes of the Netherlands, I don’t know what is. If you have lost the capacity to be shocked into action by doctors legally murdering newborns, think again. If we shrug our shoulders when those donning the guise of “ethics” can advocate for the expansion of the Final Solution of Inconvenient Persons, we will never take back our culture.
Western civilization is staring into a moral abyss. And that abyss is beginning to resemble the pits of Babi Yar.
While they seek to defend the killing, we will EndtheKilling.
