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Britain’s Foremost Eugenics Apologist Seeks Minimum Age for Premature Babies to Receive Care

Under 24 weeks, only those showing strong chance of survival to be “kept going”

LONDON, June 10, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) - This week, Britain’s foremost promoter of eugenic “Bioethics,” Baroness Helen Mary Warnock, said that Britain should follow the Dutch euthanasia model in setting an age limit below which babies would not routinely be resuscitated.

Warnock’s suggestion is that the first presumption should be not to keep the baby alive if at all possible, but to examine a case before hand with the presumption that only those infants who show a strong chance of living to be ‘healthy’ should be allowed to survive. She said, “Some doctors and nurses get competitive about the triumph of keeping these tiny, premature, babies alive,” she said. “It would be better to set a minimum age than to have no form of scrutiny or regulation. Below a certain age of gestation no baby should be kept going without very thorough scrutiny of what the prognosis for that baby is.” 

The Nuffield Council on Bioethics, a medical think tank, is investigating the long-term costs of allowing to live those who were born prematurely. In many cases, a child born very premature will suffer various disabilities throughout life. The Nuffield Council is compiling a report preliminary to suggesting new guidelines that put a 24-week limit on care for premature babies.

This is historical eugenics in its purest form that disregards any inherent sacredness to human life, and considers only economic motives. Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, that considered disabled people ‘human weeds,’ whose existence was a threat to health of the species and a drain on economic resources.

In the Netherlands, doctors routinely refuse to administer intensive care to babies born before 25 weeks gestation, despite the fact that babies are regularly saved at earlier stages than this.

Warnock’s suggestion is being resisted by most UK doctors, but government policy is guided not by the wishes of the majority but by ideological elites and economic pressures. One of Britain’s most senior pediatricians, Sir Alan Craft, president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, said, “One possible course of action would be not to intervene with any 23-week-old babies unless they breathe completely and spontaneously themselves.”

This thinking is spreading throughout the medical system. According to now-standard medical ethics guidelines, a physician, not a patient or a family, decides when a person can be starved, dehydrated or otherwise neglected to death. Recently a man with a severe and progressive neurological disease went to court to fight for the right to be kept alive with a feeding tube. Leslie Burke won his first round against the UK’s General Medical Council arguing that he, not a bioethics committee had the right to decide if his life was ‘worthy of life.’ The government is fighting the decision for its right to kill him.

Read LifeSiteNews.com coverage of the new eugenics movement:

Current Medical Euthanasia and Eugenic Abortion Practices Echo Nazi Past
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2003/oct/03100208.html

and on Leslie Burke:
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2004/feb/04022705.html

Hw

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