"Waging War Against the Weak"

Around the world, profoundly disabled or terminally ill people are increasingly being seen as resource vampires that monopolize an undue share of medical attention that should be devoted to those with lives more worth living. Not only is the odious notion of infanticide gaining Establishment acceptance—with pro-infanticide bioethicist Peter Singer now at Princeton, and supportive pieces about euthanizing terminally ill and seriously disabled babies having been published in the New England Journal of Medicine , New York Times , and Los Angeles Times , among others—-but also, a “duty to die” is gestating, beginning with Futile Care Theory in which hospital ethics committees are being empowered to allow doctors to refuse life-sustaining care based on their judgments about the quality of their patients’ lives.

This is nothing less than the rising of a “new eugenics” that perceives some lives as having greater value than others, and which in some cases sees death—including active euthanasia and assisted suicide—as an appropriate “solution” to the problems of human suffering. The original eugenics movement expressed this relativistic view of human life through hate-filled rhetoric; for example, eugenicists described disabled babies like [the Samoan baby] Miracle in terms that today would be considered hate speech. Thus, as recounted in Edwin Blacks’ splendid history of eugenics, War Against the Weak , Margaret Sanger took “the extreme eugenic view that human ‘weeds’ should be ‘exterminated.’”

Today’s new eugenicists are not that crass, of course. Indeed, rather than screaming hate and pejoratives from the rooftops, they instead ooze unctuous compassion as they croon about a “quality of life” ethic and preventing the weak—against whom they are secretly at war—from “suffering.” But behind the politically correct language, and indeed, hiding within the hearts of those who perceive themselves as profoundly caring, lurks the same old disdain of the helpless who offend because they remind us of our own imperfections and mortality.