From a piece today looking at Oregon and infant euthanasia in the Netherlands:
Dr. Joel Frader, a bioethics professor at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University, said he has a great concern about euthanasia.
“The big worry I have is that lives are being ended because of judgments about the moral worth of the individual, as opposed to the experience of the individual,” he said. “If what’s happening in the Netherlands indicates an intolerance of difference and disability, I think we have a serious moral problem.”
Arthur Caplan, chairman of the department of medical ethics at the University of Pennsylvania, says hazards abound in infant euthanasia. Like Merkens, Caplan worries about the possibility of unexpected recovery.
“Kids fool you,” he said. Sometimes infants have a poorly understood condition called “failure to thrive,” which can end in death.
“It’s a common policy in neonatal intensive care units,” Caplan said, “that you pull the technology off a child and, if the child hangs in there, you put it back.”
Sometimes with treatment, the child will survive. But if euthanasia were available, the child might not get a second chance.
“You’d have a death,” Caplan said. “There’s no room for error in euthanasia. But babies prove you wrong more often than any other patient.”





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