Wednesday, December 01, 2004

The Abortion "Slippery Slope" Becomes a Free Fall

Hugh Hewitt looked around today and lamented the following:

"MarkDRoberts has an array of key links on the ghastly 'Groningen Protocol.' Some bloggers have begun to write on the issue, though not all that I would have hoped would declare on the issue. KerrySpot, Slantpoint, a liberal evangelical, Heart, Soul & Humor (indirectly, via a post on abortion) to name three. But still far fewer than I'd have thought."

Actually, Hugh left out Captain Ed and Mark Noonan, to which I linked from my site.

I haven't been blogging much at all of late, and won't be for the rest of the month, for reasons I've stated elsewhere. Needless to say, I sympathize with Hugh's take on the GP. Even that name - "Groningen Protocol" - sounds like Tom Clancy-penned villainy. Sadly, the evil that it wreaks is all too real.

Let's review its tenets:

"Under the Groningen protocol, if doctors at the hospital think a child is suffering unbearably from a terminal condition, they have the authority to end the child's life. The protocol is likely to be used primarily for newborns, but it covers any child up to age 12."

I remember an article from just a few years ago (I don't remember the publication, but it can safely be assumed to have been a pro-life one) that sought to depict our society a generation into the future, where "unwanted" children - long since born, that is - could be simply taken and dropped off at a "euthanasia center" and "put to sleep," no different then taking a pet down to the city pound. It followed such an episode with a specific woman and a specific grade school-age little boy whose presence becomes an "inconvenience" for his mother. The grandmother, who had an abortion or two herself back in her youth, learns of her daughter's intentions and begs her to let her grandson come live with her if she doesn't want him anymore. But her daughter, scoffing at this display of her own mother's "old-fashioned attitude" and "hypocrisy," will hear nothing of it.

The scene where she tells her son to get ready so they can "go see the doctor" is one of the most singularly chilling things I have ever read.

The Groningen Protocol does that one worse by all but removing parents from the decision-making process. Well does Hugh rhetorically ask, "If the 'severely retarded' may be killed upon appropriate motion, second, debate, and majority vote, why not the moderately retarded? Why not the mildly retarded? Why not, in fact, anyone the 'independent committee' deems as usefully dispatched."

The great irony, of course, is that the country that has plunged into the depths of "Mengle medicine" is the same Holland that has blown a gasket overnight over the Islamist murder of Theo Van Gogh. Yet never has there been less moral distance between the latter and their runaway hemlockism than right now.

Hugh's other lament is that our Big Media is quiet as a, well, tomb about the GP. But can that really be surprising? Just as bloggers may be shrugging out of a sense of cynical defeatism at this latest hellbound cultural milestone, BM is like the frog in the pan of water that gradually boils itself. They've dropped so many other pretenses of minimal moral sensibility over the past few years that this is simply one more. Indeed, after over thirty years of rationalizing and defending and championing the feminist death-cult, including partial-birth abortion for the past decade, one can reasonably ask how "journalists" could not be desensitized to their creed's next logical step.

Jonah Goldberg wrote a piece yesterday arguing that the reason for the GOP's political ascension is essentially to serve as pall bearers for a culture that has already died. It came across to me as more than a tad dark, but maybe Double-H has inadvertently found an example. After all, even as the country has been getting more and more conservative electorally, the "culture war" has been being won inexorably by the Left using the courts as both sword and shield. The logical consequence of this process would be precisely what we see in reaction to the GP: libs see nothing wrong with it, consider it inevitable here as well, but don't want to "advertise" same (especially after the backlash the sodomarriage blunder generated), while traditionalists fear its inevitability as well and, quite honestly, have long since grown weary chronicling the slippery-slope descent they predicted when this trek to depravity first began.

Everyone knows the old saying, "All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." But we're reaching the point, if we haven't already long since left it behind, where evil has become so triumphant that good men are helpless - and perhaps, in the not-too-distant future, earmarked for a trip to "go see the doctor."