The new "Deposits"

Last night, I was reading the Daily Telegraph, came across this article, and felt like crying while reading it. First we have abortion for any/all unwanted babies. Then along came partial-birth abortions, where a baby who is almost newborn can be taken out of the womb and killed. Now, doctors in the UK are announcing that premature babies are just taking up too much space, time, and money, and are not worthy to live.

"Baroness Warnock, the leading medical ethics expert, has said that Britain should follow the example of Holland, the only European country that says such babies should die. She believes that it would prevent doctors from competing to keep alive babies that may not survive in the long-term."

The op-ed of the Daily yesterday had an excellent comment about these esteem members of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists:

"But there is a huge difference between turning off a life-support machine and the Dutch model, in which the survival of a baby depends on subjective assessment of its chances of survival or degree of disability. There are healthy children alive today who would have been left to die under the Dutch model. The distinction between that and infanticide is wafer-thin.

Clearly, neonatal care needs more resources. But surely the NHS is "overstretched"? Only up to a point: although there have been some job losses, it is not overstretched when it comes to "race equality steering groups" and other instruments of social engineering. Something has gone badly wrong with a health service that vigorously creates non-jobs while entertaining a policy change that is reminiscent of nothing so much as Spartans leaving feeble babies to die on hillsides."

Eugenics is what the Spartans believed in.

Spartan eugenics
The first test came early. A ravine a few miles outside the centre of Sparta was known as the Apothetae – the 'Deposits'. It was also called the 'place of rejection', because newly born Spartan boys were thrown into the ravine if they were judged unfit to live.

Infanticide was common throughout ancient Greece. Unwanted babies – usually girls – were left on hillsides. Sometimes they would be placed in a basket or protective pot so that there was at least a chance of someone coming along and taking the child in.

In Sparta, things were, as ever, different. Boys rather than girls were the likeliest candidates for infanticide. The decision about whether the child lived or died was not left to the parents but was taken by the city elders. And there was no possibility of a kindly shepherd rescuing a newborn child after it had been 'placed' down here. The decision of the city elders was final, terminal and absolute.

Such state-sponsored eugenics has won Sparta many admirers over the years. Here's what one 20th-century leader had to say on the subject:

The abandonment of sick, puny and misshapen children by the Spartans was more humanitarian and, in reality, a thousand times more humane than the pitiful madness of our present time where the most sickly subjects are preserved at any price only to be followed by the breeding of a race from degenerates burdened with disease.

No prizes for guessing that these are the words of Adolf Hitler.

After reading those articles in the Daily Telegraph, all I can say is thank God that I am no longer capable of having a child. However, if I was still able, I would make sure that I had my child back in America. When I did have my children, I was considered "high-risk." What chance, nowadays, would my daughter or others like her have growing up to be the accomplished person that she is today with three healthy and robust boys of her own? It sounds like, if the high mucky-mucks of the NHS have their way about it, not much.

I wonder how Baroness Warnock would react if she or one of her children should have a pre-mature baby. Would she be so quick to condem that child to the rocky ravins, or will she make sure her would-be child/grandchild get the best care in a private hospital.