Why on earth is anyone surprised at what is happening at a hospital in the Netherlands? The Groningen Academic Hospital announced that it has already permitted the euthanasia of terminally ill infants by the administering of lethal doses of sedatives. Once the relevance of human life was judged by its viability, or its worth determined by its convenience to others, it was only a matter of time before the destruction of inconvenient innocent children became acceptable.

Right-to-lifers have been warning for years that the euthanasia of infants was the next step from legalized abortion. What the Groningen Academic Hospital is doing is fulfilling the non-voluntary euthanasia that a Princeton University professor, Peter Singer, has been propounding for years. He has written, “Killing a disabled infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person.” He goes on: “Very often it is not wrong at all.”

Mr. Singer is an atheist, and thus his idea of morality is based on his own intellectual conclusions, but he has plenty of company. Remember Amy Richards, the woman who wrote in the New York Times Magazine that she terminated two of her triplets in utero, in large part so that she wouldn’t have to move to Staten Island?

The Human Life Foundation Inc. is an independent, nonsectarian, nonprofit 501(c)(3) corporation started in 1975 by James McFadden to promote and help provide alternatives to abortion. The Human Life Review, the foundation’s quarterly journal, focuses on abortion and other life issues. In a 1983 article that McFadden wrote warning about Mr. Singer and the new future, he claimed:

“The new future is even more awful than it seems. Even if the majority of Americans knew about what is involved, they would find it impossible to transfer Singer’s inhuman notions to their family doctor. The grand strategic factor in the current war between the ethics – meaning the quality of life ethic and the sanctity of life ethic – is that the apostles of the new future know precisely what they are doing, never mind what they may say, while the mass of Americans don’t yet realize there is a war. And those who do scarcely believe that the enemy could seriously intend the predictable results.”

At the Human Life Foundation’s annual awards dinner, that passage was read by Wesley Smith. He is an author and consumer advocate who now writes for the review. He once wrote a “My Turn” column for Newsweek magazine about a friend who had committed suicide. It was an anti-euthanasia piece, and the hate mail Mr. Smith received stunned him. He told us:

“I wondered what happened to my culture and where was I when it happened. Because I had thought that when I wrote the Newsweek piece it was utterly uncontroversial. And I have since found, in fact, that rather than those kinds of attitudes being controversial, believing in the sanctity of human life has become controversial.”

The recipient of the foundation award was Hadley Arkes, a professor at Amherst College who was the architect of the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act, which was signed into law in 2002.

That bill guarantees that live-born infants are afforded full legal rights under federal law, regardless of their stage of development – even if their live births occurred during an abortion.

Who would ever imagine that we would need a federal law to protect a helpless child born alive but unwanted? How could any doctor or nurse see that innocent babe gasping for breath and do nothing?

Wesley Smith reminded us that the eugenics movement in the early 20th century sought to distinguish the fit and the unfit, and that led to mass involuntary sterilization in America and Canada. In Nazi Germany, it led to the mass murder of people with disabilities. He also said:

“And now we have a utilitarian bioethics movement that says, no, the way we should distinguish is not humans, but between so-called persons and so-called non-persons.”

In that way, Mr. Smith said, we are told that there are humans who are not persons. So who are they, he asks?

“It is also newborns. Newborns are not self-aware over time, so Peter Singer infamously says that parents should have up to a year to decide whether to keep or kill the newborn child. And if the interests of the family are not served by having that baby, the parents should be able to kill that child.”

Many pundits have minimized the last election results as a case of the religious right’s pushing their moral values on the rest of the country. Perhaps the silent majority who are on the side of the sanctity-of-life ethic recognizes that the Netherlands protocol is right around the corner.