Euthanasia and the Slippery Slope

Blogger Amy Welborn discusses, and links to, a disturbing article by Wesley Smith about the euthanizing of disabled children in the Netherlands:

For anyone paying attention to the continuing collapse of medical ethics in the Netherlands, this isn't at all shocking. Dutch doctors have been surreptitiously engaging in eugenic euthanasia of disabled babies for years, although it technically is illegal, since infants can't consent to be killed. Indeed, a disturbing 1997 study published in the British medical journal, the Lancet, revealed how deeply pediatric euthanasia has already metastasized into Dutch neo natal medical practice: According to the report, doctors were killing approximately 8 percent of all infants who died each year in the Netherlands. That amounts to approximately 80-90 per year. Of these, one-third would have lived more than a month. At least 10-15 of these killings involved infants who did not require life-sustaining treatment to stay alive. The study found that a shocking 45 percent of neo-natologists and 31 percent of pediatricians who responded to questionnaires had killed infants.
It took the Dutch almost 30 years for their medical practices to fall to the point that Dutch doctors are able to engage in the kind of euthanasia activities that got some German doctors hanged after Nuremberg. For those who object to this assertion by claiming that German doctors killed disabled babies during World War II without consent of parents, so too do many Dutch doctors: Approximately 21 percent of the infant euthanasia deaths occurred without request or consent of parents. Moreover, since when did parents attain the moral right to have their children killed?

As lawyers and law students know, the "slippery slope" claim is simultaneously one of the most often criticized, and most often employed, forms of argument. For a fabulous article discussing and evaluating the argument, see "The Mechanisms of the Slippery Slope," by law professor and uber-blogger Eugene Volokh. I'm inclined to agree with what I take to be one of Volokh's many important points, namely, that "slippery slopes" are real, and a "real cause for concern."

Rick