Church supports baby euthanasia

The UK Times ^ | Sunday 12 November 2006 | Peter Zimonjic

[silverleaf]

Church Supports Baby Euthanasia

THE Church of England has joined one of Britain’s royal medical colleges in calling for legal euthanasia of seriously disabled newborn babies. Church leaders want doctors to be given the right to withhold treatment from seriously disabled newborn babies in exceptional circumstances.

Their call, overriding the presumption that life should be preserved at any cost, follows that of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecology, revealed in The Sunday Times last week.

The church’s position was laid out in a submission to an independent inquiry, due to publish its report this week, into the ethical concerns surrounding the treatment of severely premature babies.

In the submission Tom Butler, Bishop of Southwark, states: “It may in some circumstances be right to choose to withhold or withdraw treatment, knowing it will possibly, probably, or even certainly result in death.”

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-2450134,00.html

[silverleaf]

The slope gets slippier and slippier. When these men of God meet God, I suppose they will have an interesting time explaining decisions like this.

[silverleaf]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-2450134,00.html

[Old_Mil]

...no wonder Islam is seeing such success in England.

[sionnsar]

ping for tomorrow's list ping

[struggle]

The greatest and saddest irony. God made that life with a plan for it that you men decide to extinguish.

[Virginia Ridgerunner]

The Anglican leaders who made this decision are going straight to Hell, do not pass go...!

[Malacoda]

Any church that advocates this is no longer a church of God.

[PatrickF4]

I guess some humans are more human than others... and those others should be killed so that we don't have to suffer by caring for them, or seeing them "suffer" from their disability. This is ethics??????????

[Mad Dawg]

The Episcopal deal is this: They say,"Well in such and such a dreadfully diifcult case it might be okay to so such and siuch a thing, therefore we will not speak against the thing. THEN the thing becomes licit, as far as the people in the pews are concerned, in any case. So the Episcopal Church says, we can see some cases where abortion might be okay, but it would always be sad. So the conservatives are mollified and the liberals say the church is pro-choise. Then, within a few years it is entirely pro-choice. Where orthodoxy is optional it is soon proscribed.

YMMV, but that's how it looked when I was a priest.

[Cicero]

I read this article a couple of times, and I'm puzzled what the Times means by "Church of England." The article says that "Tom Butler, Bishop of Southwark" made a submission to the commission. It does not say who the Bishop is speaking for--himself, his colleagues? Nothing is said about a meeting of the bishops, and certainly not a formal Westminster Assembly.

Even if the Archbishop of Canterbury speaks out on some matter, it is not necessarily official Anglican doctrine, although he has more authority than the other bishops.

Not that the Anglican Church isn't riddled with heresy on all sorts of issues. They very easily could come out in favor of baby killing, as well as abortion. But it's possible that this article misinterprets the meaning of the Bishop of Southwerk's submission. Maybe he's just a flaky bishop.

[eleni121]

This cannot be true. Tell me it ain't real. It's some kind of sick joke right?

[MarilynBr]

Slippery slope? Sadly, I think we are already at the bottom in the pit.

[BW2221]

If the Brits had half a brain, they would be on their knees in Rome, begging the Pope to take them back.

The Anglican/Episcopal church is a joke.

[RFEngineer]

"The slope gets slippier and slippier"

Indeed it does. These "men of God" want to PLAY God.

Sure they should know better, but that they don't speaks volumes about what the CoE has become, along with their fellow hedonists in the Episcopal church in America.

[I_Like_Spam]

This is no religion at all, if they support infanticide.

If this is there position, they might as well board up their churches , shut off the lights and go home. They're useless to everyone now.

[Mrs. P]

Coming soon to a representative republic near you.

[PetroniusMaximus]

"Maybe he's just a flaky bishop."

And there certainly is no shortage of those.

[madison10]

The Church of England and the Episcopals: Just what Jesus had in mind. /sarc

[Pete from Shawnee Mission]

The story states that The church is "calling for legal euthanasia of seriously disabled newborn babies"

But the bishop says:

"It may in some circumstances be right to choose to withhold or withdraw treatment, knowing it will possibly, probably, or even certainly result in death"

Now to me it seems that the newspaper has misstated what the bishop said. It is one thing to administer morphine to deliberately kill a person--Euthanasia--it is another to stop treatment when it is obvious that the treatment will not save a life.

While it is clear where the doctors stand, they do not provide enough information to determine whether the bishop is saying we should withhold treatment only in the case of a terminally ill child, or that handicapped children who might otherwise live also should not be treated. I have a hard time trusting newspapers. It doesn't sound like he is promoting euthanasia--actively killing a sick person.

[LibFreeOrDie]

So those pagans were right after all! Just leave those unwanted, malformed babies out on a rock somewhere to die.

But we do it so nicely now... in private, not in a public place...efficiently, neatly. We are SO advanced! /s