ANGLICAN BISHOP CALLS FOR EUTHANASIA OF NEWBORNS

According to the Daily Mail, at least some Britons are reacting with outrage to reports that a prominent Anglican Bishop has called for euthanasia of sick newborn babies. The headline is admittedly inflammatory:

Outrage as Church backs calls for severely disabled babies to be killed at birth

and also incorrect, since according to the article, the Bishop of Southwark, the Right Reverend Tom Butler, didn't call for babies to be killed, but merely that sick babies be left to die on their own without attempts at medical treatment:

The Church of England has broken with tradition dogma by calling for doctors to be allowed to let sick newborn babies die.

The Right Reverend Bishop wrote an official Church of England paper "for a public inquiry into the ethical issues surrounding the care of long premature or desperately ill newborn babies." Evidently the Right Reverend Bishop has become a better socialist than a Pastor, since he is now more concerned with the "common good" than with the fate of an individual human being:

And the Bishop of Southwark, Tom Butler, who is the vice chair of the Church of England's Mission and Public Affairs Council, has also argued that the high financial cost of keeping desperately ill babies alive should be a factor in life or death decisions.

What is interesting, and encouraging, in the article, is the fact that spokesmen for disabled Britons are taking up their rhetorical cudgels and opposing Britain's slide into a moral abyss:

A spokeswoman for the UK Disabled People's Council, which represents tens of thousands of members in 140 different organisations, said: "How can the Church of England say that Christian compassion includes killing of disabled babies either through the withdrawing or withholding of treatment or by active euthanasia? It is not for doctors or indeed anyone else to determine whether a baby’s life is worthwhile simply on the grounds of impairment or health condition."

We saw a similar phenomenon during Mrs. Schiavo's agony: courageous disabled Americans saw her demise at the hands of her estranged husband, his lawyers, and the Courts as a thinkly veiled threat against their lives. According to the Church of England:

"The principle of justice inevitably means that the potential cost of treatment itself, the longer term costs of health care and education and opportunity cost to the NHS in terms of saving other lives have to be considered."

That seems a very radical departure from the lesson that the Bible imparted by informing us that the human race had its essential origin in the creation of a single human life.

When the Church of England joins forces with philosophers who advocate infanticide, even if at the present time it advocates only passive rather than active euthanasia, it has slid very far down the slippery slope towards "the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomlesse."