1983 January/February issue Part 1

Give them parking space but let them starve to death.

Another moral threshold was crossed last April when a tiny baby boy, at the specific requests of his parents and with the sanction of the Supreme Court of Indiana, was starved to death in hospital. “Infant Doe” (he was not allowed the usual recognition of being human by being named), born with Down’s syndrome and a malfunctioning esophagus (the latter could have been corrected with surgery), died, as the Washington Post (April 18) stated, “not because he couldn’t sustain life without a million dollars worth of medical machinery, but because no one fed him.” For six days the nurses in that Bloomington hospital went about their usual routines of bathing and changing and feeding all the newborns except one. They changed and bathed Baby Doe but never gave him a bottle. Over his crib was a notice, DO NOT FEED. Several couples came forward, begging to be allowed to adopt him. They were turned down.

What went on in that little box during those six terrible days and nights? We turn our imagination away. It’s unthinkable. But if I were to think about it, and put down on paper what I saw, I would be accused of playing on peoples feelings, and of  making infanticide (yes, infanticide- call it what it is) an “emotional issue.” Let me suppose that the baby at least cried loud- quite loudly (at first). One reporter said that he was placed in a room alone, lest his crying disturb others (others, perhaps, who were capable of helping him).

Joseph Sobran in his column in the Los Angeles Times Syndicate on April 20 suggested that ‘opposition to infanticide will soon be deplored as the dogma of a few religious sects who want to impose their views on everyone else.” The language sounds sickeningly familiar.

There has been a conspicuous silence from those who usually raise shrill protest when other human rights are violated- the rights of smokers, homosexuals and criminals are often as loudly insisted upon as those of children, women and the handicapped.

The handicapped? What on earth is happening when a society is so careful to provide premium parking spaces to make things easier for them, but sees no smaller inconsistency when one of them who happens to be too young to scream, “For God’s sake, feed me!” is quietly murdered? Is it in the name of humanity, humaneness, compassion and freedom that these things occur but never is it acknowledged that the real reasons are comfort and convenience, that is, simple selfishness.  “Abortion not only prefers comfort, convenience or advantage of the pregnant women to the very life of her unborn child, a fundamentally good thing, but seeks to deny that the life never existed. In this sense it is a radical denial not only of the worth of a specific life but of the essential goodness of life itself and the providential ordering of its procreation.” ( R.V.Young, “taking choice seriously,” The Human life Review, Vol VIII, No.3)

But weren’t we talking about infanticide and haven’t we now switched now to abortion? The premises on which abortion is justified are fundamentally the same on which infanticide is seen as civilized and acceptable. What Hitler used to call eugenics is now called “quality of life”, never mind whether the life in question happens to be the mother’s or the child’s. Death, according to three doctors who put the issue out into the open in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1973, is now considered an option in the “treatment” of infants; in other words, a mortuary may now replace the nursery. One cannot help thinking of the antiseptic “shower rooms” of the Third Reich, where the unwanted were “treated” to death. Nor can one forget the words of Jesus, “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” Can any Christian argue that the smallest and most defenseless are, by virtue merely of being too small and too defenseless not His brethren?