Putting Infants to Death

Westerners have increasingly sought to save their loved ones from suffering. The persistent pursuit of this objective has captivated Westerners for generations. Saving society, governments, and insurers from the costs of caring for those in pain or who are otherwise imperfect has accelerated since progressives, the New Leviathans, assumed control of universities and governments over the past one hundred years or so.

This accelerating move toward efficiency and perfection was highlighted by Justice Holmes’ Buck v. Bell decision in 1927, legalizing mandatory sterilization in America on the grounds that two generations of imbeciles are enough. Even though there was no evidence supporting the inference that Carrie Buck suffered from a mental deficiency, Justice Holmes’ suspect ideas were further advanced by Nazi Germany’s pioneering work to legalize the “compassionate’ killing of infants in 1939.

Now, Canada is poised to follow Nazi Germany’s disturbing example by killing itself on a road marked with eugenics and alleged human progress. As highlighted in an Atlantic magazine article this past September, the Quebec College of Physicians has raised the idea of extending Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) program to cover infants under one year old in cases of “severe deformities.”

After all, Canada has already expanded the reach of its MAID program from patients whose death was “reasonably foreseeable” to “Track 2” cases, which do not require the apprehension of imminent death. Indeed, Canada’s MAID program has been expanded to include cases such as one involving a 51-year-old Ontario woman who requested—and received—MAID simply because her housing benefits prevented her from relocating to an apartment that would relieve her crippling allergies.

This last example has provoked an article entitled “Why is Canada euthanizing the poor?” Indeed, the empirical evidence available implies that Canada is—inadvertently or deliberately—dealing with mounting health care costs via euthanasia. Since MAID became law in 2016, this program has led to 76,000 deaths in Canada, with the province of Quebec leading the way.

Theoretically, of course, euthanasia advocates argue that MAID and similar programs in the Netherlands are based on the liberalizing force of consent. Before accepting this conclusion, three questions demand answers: First, can infants under one year old give their consent? Second, will the province of Quebec follow its existing pattern and ignore existing Canadian law by telling prosecutors to refrain from prosecuting physicians who administer MAID to children? And finally, can consent, even presumably liberal consent, justify the destruction of human life?

Such questions assume center stage because Westerners, and Canadians in particular, have become captivated by the notion of human progress and a specific form of liberty predicated on human rationality, civilizational advancement, and the mandates of progress. Such goals have often been limited only when words or actions result in harm.

Ending human suffering as a harm-reducing goal evidently legitimates Justice Holmes' decision to legalize sterilization. The acceptance of Holmes’ goal—to end human suffering in pursuit of perfection—provides a glide path for Canada to join Nazi Germany’s progressive pursuit of human perfection, while simultaneously reducing its medical costs, thus paving the road to despotism.

Against this backdrop, Westerners often forget sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s extraordinary claim that “[t]he Holocaust was born and executed in our modern rational society, at the high stage of our civilization and at the peak of human cultural achievement …”. From the peak of the Progressive Era, the West has succumbed to what has been called the Ionian Enchantment, “a belief that the unity of knowledge explains everything.” This deceptive idea paves the way for evil to advance in the name of progress that is managed and manipulated by society’s elites.

Belief in the Ionian Enchantment fostered numerous experiments aimed at transforming human behavior and experience. Many of these transformative experiments took place in the United States and Canada. In the United States, for instance, asylums were introduced as mere storage bins for human refuse, where patients rotted away, spending their days restrained by straitjackets and their nights locked in covered cribs as Progressives expanded their commitment to efficiency by seeking legal,  scientific, and hygienic isolation of those who were seen as “unfit.”

On this view, the “unfit” and the “unemployable” were seen as a threat to the economic and financial vitality of the nation. This “progressive” viewpoint—which captivated some Christian ministers—inevitably led to a sustained campaign to win judicial and legal approval of eugenic sterilization in the United States, a campaign that continued to the 1970’s in some states.

This progressive campaign was often waged under the banner of freedom of thought and freedom of expression. But progressives almost always had a singular goal: regime change, wherein religion, tradition, majority rule, and the custom of valuing the human would be driven into retreat in favor of elite-led progressivism that would rule the roost.

If this analysis is correct, the advocates of extending MAID to infants in Canada are likely to find an open pathway that would place Quebec and Canada at the forefront of a gigantic social experiment that is unlikely to end well. After all, this move is likely to be advanced by MAID practitioners, including doctors Ellen Wiebe, who has facilitated the deaths of more than 430 patients, and Stephanie Green, co-founder and president of the Canadian Association of MAID assessors, who has overseen another 300 or so deaths.

Few elites are willing to question the justification for the expansion of MAID to infants. After all, experts argue that some infants are suffering, even if they cannot tell us whether they are suffering unbearable pain.

But we must remember that in 1938, Adolf Hitler asked Karl Brandt, the Nazi’s Commissioner of Health and Emergency Service, to study the case of a baby boy who was born blind, missing a leg and part of an arm, and with a diminished mental capacity. We should also remember that Brandt testified at Nuremberg that Hitler promised immunity from prosecution for physicians who carried out the euthanasia of children.

Of course, neither Brandt nor Hitler was prepared to stop with one child. Brandt would go on to organize the notorious Aktion T4 euthanasia project as part of an all-age, industrial-scale social cleansing campaign. Evidently, once the barrier of killing the innocents is breached, there is no upper limit on the willingness of experts to end suffering, advance efficiency, and embrace despotism.