Infanticide and Humans’ Pursuit of Perfection

Humankind’s pursuit of perfection on the road to paradise has always turned dark. Often this progressive pursuit has relied on questionable science that leads inevitably toward eugenics and planned breeding that culminates “in the lethal tenets of the Nazi regime.” This quest for perfection continues to reverberate throughout the West today.

Consider the Bollinger baby, a seven-pound baby boy viewed as “dangerous as dynamite” and a “menace to society.” As Alexander Raikin reports in First Things, a routine medical procedure could have saved his life, but he was born deformed: missing his right ear, with defective skin on his shoulder, and, critically, there was a blockage at the end of his intestine. This blockage sealed his fate.

There will be no lifesaving operation. The crying boy with chubby legs, facing the press, is destined to be starved and dehydrated to death. This is because the experts decided in 1915 that it was an act of “kindest mercy” to put the child out of his misery on the road to societal progress. And the editorial board of the New Republic, Helen Keller, and many other commentators agreed.

Many of these commentators were in thrall to the progressive campaign to cleanse society of “defective” people through the evisceration of humans’ reproductive capacity. They stressed a cultural commitment to progress, public health, and societal efficiency. Progressive commentators believed in the state's inherent capacity to design effective programs. They coupled blithe confidence in the Progressives’ ability to create effective forms of treatment with their dangerous faith in the state's benevolence and its expert agents.

The Bollinger baby became the first publicized case of a newborn forced to die because of his disabilities. His death illustrates the danger in believing in the state and its agents.

The physician who authorized the Bollinger baby’s death, Harry Haiselden, became a celebrity. Haiselden, a surgeon at the German-American Hospital in Chicago, argued that he treated a series of defective patients like he did because he loved them. In essence, he said that without his love,  semi-human creatures  “would drag themselves along all our streets.”

Today, Krystal VanderBrugghen, a mother of a sick child, wrestles with the outcome of Haiselden’s victory—Krystal’s case and others like hers pit parents of sick children against physicians of their disabled children. Although conclusive proof is hard to come by, Vanderbrugghen’s case highlights the possibility that children at the best children’s hospital in the world, the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, are receiving inadequate care.

Inadequacy of care may be an understatement.

This is so because if Raikin’s reporting is accurate, his examination of the Hospital for Sick Children is marked by the hospital’s decision to decline his questions concerning infanticide and discriminatory treatment of some sick children. Placing the hospital’s decision to decline to answer such questions in context, it is essential to note that two years after Canada legalized Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID), a euphemism for euthanasia, a panel inside the hospital envisioned providing this procedure for children without parental consent.

But reality may be far worse. One study found that between 1952 and 1971, more than 50 percent of children at the Hospital for Sick Children who suffered from Down syndrome and blocked food passages were left to die of their obstructions. Such events may provoke cynics to suggest that the West’s pursuit of freedom, human autonomy, liberalism, and scientific rationalism has allowed Progressivism to transform itself into a nightmare. This nightmare has a name. Philosopher John Gray labels this outcome: the rise of the New Leviathans.

On this view, experts, acting on behalf of an all-powerful sovereign, should rule our lives without restraint. John Gray’s sober account suggests that what we are witnessing is nothing less than the rise of the New Authoritarians under the grim façade of law.

This rise of the New Authoritarians allows society to weaponize compassion through selective non-treatment. If true, society is well on its way toward enabling the alleged desire to end human suffering to justify human liquidation.

Sober readers should observe that the pursuit of perfection allows experts to play God.