In a 2015 report by the European Centre for Law and Justice called “Late Term Abortion & Neonatal Infanticide in Europe,” a doctor gives eyewitness testimony of infanticide.
The doctor, identified as Mrs. D.F., was called into a room and asked her opinion on a baby who had just been born. She was interning in pediatrics in a busy hospital at the time:
The senior pediatrician of the guard called me and asked me to join him in the neonatal resuscitation room juxtaposed to delivery rooms. A child who has just been born is intubated and ventilated. The child presented multi-system organ failure and the morphotype of a child carrying Down’s syndrome (none of these signs had been detected during prenatal ultrasounds). My boss asked me to tell him what I think of the features of this baby. After my answer, he asked the present anesthesiologist if any of the mother’s epidural product remained, which was the case. He took it and then injected the child, who died in a minute or two alone. As the child lay dying, the two doctors were talking, without any discomfort and with no regard for this baby. As for the parents, they were informed about the health status of their child after his death!
Would this baby have survived if he’d been given medical treatment? There is no way to know. But it’s clear that the doctors took matters into their own hands and gave the baby no chance at life. Had the child been lacking any signs of disability, would they have killed him? Sadly, there are many in the medical community who do not value people with Down syndrome.
Pro-choice author Rayna Rapp, who herself aborted a baby with Down syndrome, writes about several such cases in her book Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: The Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America. In a similar case, a mother had just given birth to child with Down syndrome. Again, the baby’s condition was not detected prior to birth. The baby’s mother tells the story:
She was tiny, but she was great, like she was just the cutest thing. And then my husband comes in, and he looked weird and immediately he said, “The baby, something is wrong…” And all I could think of was that she’s blind, I guess that was probably the worst thing I could ever have imagined. But the doctor had just called him and told him that Rose was a Mongoloid. We took a half hour to get it out of him, like he couldn’t finish telling me the story, and then the doctor came in and said, “What your husband just told you is right.” He was, like, very down on the whole thing, very negative. He said, “The only blessing is that they don’t tend to live very long.” So he thought it would be a good thing if our new baby would die. What more can I say?
Rapp quotes a second mother who gave birth to child with Down syndrome:
So they diagnosed Amelia right away, on the delivery table. She was barely out, I barely got a chance to catch my breath or marvel at my first baby when the doctor pours this bad news all over us. “She’s got Down’s syndrome,” he says to us, very coldly. And after he tells us about blood testing and confirmations and all this stuff, we say to him, “But what does this mean? What should we expect?” And just as coldly he says, “Don’t expect much. Maybe she’ll grow up to be an elevator operator. Don’t expect much.” We clung to each other and cried.
The doctors who injected the first newborn baby with drugs (mentioned above) clearly saw no value in the child. They executed him with no more pangs of conscience than a person stepping on an ant.
There was no acknowledgment of the baby’s value as a human being or of his right to life, and the parents were not given a chance to see or hold their baby while he was alive. This callous execution of a disabled person brings to mind the doctors in Nazi Germany who descended on homes for disabled children and murdered their residents, years before the concentration camps were established.
With so little regard for a newly born child, how would these doctors view an adult with Down syndrome, or another cognitive disability, who came to them for help? What kind of medical care would they have offered an older patient with Down syndrome who had an illness or injury?
These doctors played God and took the life of a disabled child. Although there is no way to know for sure that the child would have survived, the callousness of these doctors is appalling.
