Death Anyone?

From the London Daily Telegraph:

Killing babies no different from abortion, experts say

Parents should be allowed to have their newborn babies killed because they are “morally irrelevant” and ending their lives is no different to abortion, a group of medical ethicists linked to Oxford University has argued. 

[You can click here http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/9113394/Killing-babies-no-different-from-abortion-experts-say.html to read the entire article. 

This article appears in the wake of recent accounts of wide-spread abortions in the UK that are solely due to sex selection; people don't want a boy or don't want a girl so they get rid of it. Even though this is contrary to laws/regulations doctors are doing it.

Then there is the news this week that the Netherlands has formed mobile euthanasia teams for home visits; each team is permitted only one termination a week due to the stress terminating lives puts on people. 

 While not defending the "medical ethicists" position on infanticide, their logic is obvious, a logic that many people, both for and against abortion and euthanasia, have seen for generations. The fact that a baby is on the inside or outside of a mother's body is an issue of "place", why should a life be terminated (or not terminated) based on place? Why should being outside a mother's body be a "safe harbor" and inside a mother's body be a potential killing zone? It isn't logical to many people. These medical ethicists are simply holding a mirror up for society to see itself; this may not be their intention, but this is what they are doing. Most of society will choose to see something else when they look in the mirror.

At what point would the ethicists have us treat a baby outside the body as a person? Will there be a panel to tell us? 

Abortions due to the sex of a baby: if the baby were outside the mother's body would that be sex discrimination? Is this insanity? 

And then we have the Netherlands, a nation that suffered under Hitler now leading the way in a culture of death. In all three of these instances the medical profession sheds its historic mantle of protecting and preserving life and becomes a purveyor of death. I wonder if generations from now this time will be looked upon as we look upon the Fascist medical doctors? The difference is that the average German could plead ignorance; we can't.   

Postscript: The bad news is that abortion and euthanasia have touched many people; the Good News is that God in Christ loves us all and that His arms of forgiveness and healing are open to us all. God's love for us is without measure and He deeply desires to heal us and cleanse us and to bring us into an intimate relationship with Himself. Few, if any, of us have not been touched and tainted by the culture of death; if it hasn't been via abortion or euthanasia it's been through another way, perhaps one we're not conscious of. For example: when professing Christians are vitriolic and hateful toward those with whom they disagree they are drinking from the cup of death and often feeding the fires of a death culture, which is also a hate culture. 

Life is best lived through the lens that we have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God; we've all missed God's purpose for us; and that God loves us with all that He is (for how else could God love?) and that through Jesus Christ He has made a Way for us to come into relationship with Himself. 

Let us weep for one another rather than heap vitriol, for we are all blind to one degree or another, and it is only in the light of God that we see light, that we see things (in a measure) as they are.