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PaperclipPerfector  21hr ago (text post)   3258 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 14, 2026

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Following up on the surrogacy story shared by @MollieTheMare last week, I present to you yet another man-made horror beyond our comprehension:

https://www.lifenews.com/2026/09/14/netherlands-euthanizes-disabled-2-year-old-child/

Another link if you think a pro-life website isn't a trustworthy source: https://nltimes.nl/2026/09/09/first-ever-case-euthanasia-young-child-2-handled-well-dutch-committee

"The doctor and the parents decided to actively end the child’s life after concluding that the supposed suffering could not be relieved, according to the Assessment Committee for Late-Term Abortion and Termination of Life in Newborns and Children Ages 1 to 12."

My first thought while reading this article, apart from general horror at what was done, was "The WHAT committee?" My second thought was to Philip K. Dick's now officially prophetic short story, The Pre-Persons. That's right, if you didn't know, the father of cyberpunk and author of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (i.e. Blade Runner) and We Can Remember It for You Wholesale (i.e. Total Recall) was anti-abortion (emphasis mine):

“Oh, good Lord,” his mother exclaimed, on seeing him. “What in the name of God have you been doing?”

He said stammeringly, “I — saw — the abortion — truck.”

“And you thought it was for you?” Mutely, he nodded.

“Listen, Walter,” Cynthia Best said, kneeling down and taking hold of his trembling hands, “I promise, your dad and I both promise, you’ll never be sent to the County Facility. Anyhow you’re too old. They only take children up to twelve.”

Infanticide is nothing new in human history. And while Christian societies haven't been free from killing infants en masse via exposure, abortion, and other means, they have been (as far as I can tell) effectively the only societies in human history to even attempt to abolish the practices. Philip K. Dick, for example, was Episcopalian (though he shifted towards a more Gnostic view of Christianity towards the end of his life).

I guess I'm mostly curious to see everyone's reactions to this story, but also to my assertion that opposition to these things is almost exclusively a Christian thing. I'd be curious to see some secular humanist or other arguments against them, though I strongly suspect that they will be smuggling in some very Christian assumptions without realizing it. After all, to quote Leon Trotsky: "We must rid ourselves once and for all of the Quaker-Papist babble about the sanctity of human life."

This situation is quite different from existing euthanasia cases because the subject did not have the ability to ask for it or consent at all. My understanding is in most past cases the subject agreed to it in some capacity or another.

If this case holds, then logically just killing vegetables and tards in general will follow. Honestly I'm not all that against it. The idea of having to take care of a disabled human for life is insanely terrifying, and I think leaving an escape hatch would sooth alot of worrying. Ideally it can even apply to the trash on the streets with brains irreversibly fried by hard drugs.

I think it’s ethical.

The “abortion” label obscures and the child’s age is irrelevant. This is putting down someone in pain who can’t advocate for themselves and won’t get better. Imagine they were 80 and not parents but children made the decision. Imagine they were you. We can’t prove certainly they were miserable, but all signs indicate such; and the alternative for them is not really living, at least I can’t imagine them being happy.

From the pro-life site:

That damage left the child with severe cerebral palsy, a visual impairment, and frequent epileptic seizures that were largely unresponsive to medication.

The child was restless, often unable to sleep for long periods, and had mucus in the lungs that made breathing and swallowing very difficult.

“All facets of ‘being human’ — regarding motor skills, behavior, and personality — were severely impaired and were not going to improve,” the committee said in its defense of the euthanasia. [Yes, from the biased committee, but the site doesn’t argue motor skills, behavior, or personality are present]

Yeah, born 26 weeks early and with severe brain damage. Also visual impairments, cerebral palsy, and untreatable epileptic seizures. The kid could be kept alive through likely expensive and invasive means, with no hope of alleviating the suffering. But that seems largely pointless. Based on the article, this is not a case that modern medicine is capable of treating, so instead the decision was made to end the life as humanely as possible.

26 weeks early

*At 26 weeks (i. e., 13 weeks early)

Oh yeah, true. Nice catch. Doesn't change the overall point though, that this is what euthanasia is supposed to be.

Euthanasia is a solved problem and the only explanation for its advocates call for it is that they have insufficient care for the lives they're ending. There is no circumstance, NONE, where it is necessary to actively end a nonthreatening person's life. Not when you can just give them the fun drugs in quantities sufficient to render their suffering moot. This kid should have been on fentanyl, not murdered. (If the drug kills the patient as a side effect that's unfortunate, though predictable. At least they had the best available time beforehand.)

Not when you can just give them the fun drugs in quantities sufficient to render their suffering moot.

I'm not a hedonic utilitarian: I'd rather die.

What about people who are functionally dead (like brain death) or people who were functionally never born (as is arguable in this case)?

Well the fentanyl isn't going to make things any worse for them, then. It's a little more expensive for the parents or society that keeps them alive, but not THAT much more expensive. Drugs is cheap yo. Especially as they wouldn't be alive for that much longer in proportion to how much fun they're having.

Pleasure causing drugs don't fix all problems, and for people who functionally don't have brains they aren't really doing much.

It's not about fixing problems, it's about giving the sufferer the a quality of life better than being dead. And I feel like that shouldn't be a super high bar because people regularly persevere through absolutely horrible circumstances instead of choosing death

If the person is truly braindead, then the drugs aren't any WORSE than euthanasia. The point is to avoid deliberately killing someone who would have otherwise preferred life-- even in the meanest sense.

The drugs are not perfect and do not make a negative value life have positive value. Would you like to be a fentanyl addict, for example? A miserable existence.

I think fentanyl addicts prefer their drugged state to their undrugged state, and prefer it also to being killed. If either of those things fail to hold, then their problem is insufficiently fun drugs. Now, it's hard to say whether the epileptic braindead child would prefer drugs to death, but I feel confident enough guessing that insofar as they have preferences, they would enjoy fentanyl as a little treat. The problem with fentanyl globally is that it prevents people from living full, healthy lives in other ways... But I don't think that's a concern in this incident.

One thing I do wonder about, what is your perspective on why this story is uniquely outrageous? Given the medical history, it seems to me more similar than usual to the numerous cases of the life support plug being pulled on the comatose and braindead of more advanced age. I'm aware that Christians tend to not particularly like those either, if prompted, but there does not seem to be that much of an organised opposition and ultimately they are just not what the outrage machine winds up putting on the frontpages of the internet. At the same time, neither the article you linked nor you seem to be pushing an angle suggesting that children are somehow more precious or morally valuable than adults; the focus is instead squarely on the adults making the decision.

Given this, you should understand why it is so easy for your outgroup to convince itself and the NPCface peanut gallery that pro-life activism is really about controlling women's sexuality. The account in which the pro-life activist is theory-of-minded as thinking something like "finally a woman got saddled with the deserved consequences [that is, being a joyless full-time caretaker who stays in the home] of all her fornicating, and now she is trying to weasel herself out of them!", however uncharitable, at least explains all the observations. If pro-lifers have a better account of what is actually the value function according to which they decide what to be outraged about, they have not succeeded in letting it be widely known.

Given the medical history, it seems to me more similar than usual to the numerous cases of the life support plug being pulled on the comatose and braindead of more advanced age. I'm aware that Christians tend to not particularly like those either, if prompted, but there does not seem to be that much of an organised opposition and ultimately they are just not what the outrage machine winds up putting on the frontpages of the internet.

That, and also the death penalty, and war. Apparently slaughtering Persian schoolgirls for no reason is a-ok but aborting a 2 month fetus is not. Weird.

Really crazy. You'd think that Christians would think about what a just war is, compared to an unjust war, and come up with some kind of, uh, theory about it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_war_theory#Criteria

Just cause

The reason for going to war needs to be just and cannot, therefore, be solely for recapturing things taken or punishing people who have done wrong; innocent life must be in imminent danger and intervention must be to protect life. A contemporary view of just cause was expressed in 1993 when the US Catholic Conference said: "Force may be used only to correct a grave, public evil, i.e., aggression or massive violation of the basic human rights of whole populations."

It fails this massively.

Last resort

The principle of last resort stipulates that all non-violent options must first be exhausted before the use of force can be justified. Diplomatic options, sanctions, and other non-military methods must be attempted or validly ruled out before the engagement of hostilities. Further, in regard to the amount of harm—proportionally—the principle of last resort would support using small intervention forces first and then escalating rather than starting a war with massive force such as carpet bombing or nuclear warfare.[81]

Fails.

Probability of success

According to this principle, there must be good grounds for concluding that aims of the just war are achievable

Remote attacking of maybe-military bases has basically no chance of actually conquering Iran so it is just harassment which fails this criterion.

Competent authority

Only duly constituted public authorities may wage war. "A just war must be initiated by a political authority within a political system that allows distinctions of justice. Dictatorships (e.g. Hitler's regime) or deceptive military actions (e.g. the 1969 US bombing of Cambodia) are typically considered as violations of this criterion.

Fails by deceptive clause. Although, my most controversial take here, I do not believe Trump or POTUS generally has competent authority. POTUS is popularly selected, not meritocratically selected, and most Ancient Christians would agree the USA system of government is structurally invalid. It is basically just mob rule. It's not different than some random street gang going to war. It might be worse because in theory the gangsters have gone through some kind of selective merit mechanism if they have survived for any length of time. The USA is a big never challenged plot of land run by a popularity government, the opposite of competent authority. And Trump embodies this perfectly.

Trump literally committed the worst sin by slaughtering the leader of Iran surreptitiously.

How do you feel about the assassination of Admiral Yamamoto during WWII?

You complained about the death penalty and war, not the specifics of the current war in Iran, and I answered that. I don't particularly care whether or not you feel any given current thing act of war fits just war theory or not, I'm pointing out that Christians have a perfectly good answer to the questions of war and, of course, the death penalty. The "what would 'Ancient Christians' (do you mean the Apostles? The Church Fathers? Constantine?) think" thing is pretty much incoherent, because formalized just war theory was Medieval rather than Roman - look how vague the theory from Ambrose is in the wikipedia article you're quoting. My suspicion, though, is that they would be significantly closer to "this is the coolest thing ever, bold Christian knights flew o'er the Ocean to capture a God-hating rebel, and annihilated a heathen prince with bolts from the sky!"

I'm pointing out that Christians have a perfectly good answer to the questions of war and, of course, the death penalty

significantly closer to "this is the coolest thing ever, bold Christian knights flew o'er the Ocean to capture a God-hating rebel, and annihilated a heathen prince with bolts from the sky!"

Okay with ethics like that why be anti abortion? We're back to it actually being about fornication because it ain't about valuing life.

Okay with ethics like that why be anti abortion? We're back to it actually being about fornication because it ain't about valuing life.

It turns out that while innocent life is worth protecting, those subjected to the death penalty aren't generally considered innocent, and neither are soldiers in a war under, to my understanding, a somewhat different model.

And Trump literally committed the worst sin by slaughtering the leader of Iran surreptitiously.

I'm pretty sure it's well agreed that the Israelis murdered the ayatollah. Whether the US's participation in the war was instrumental in his death is certainly up for debate, but Trump was nowhere near ordering him to be blown up.

Additionally the list of criteria you listed is one of secular philosophy. Despite incorporating elements of christian thinking, the overall criteria is the result of secular thought.

most Ancient Christians would agree the USA system of government is structurally invalid. It is basically just mob rule. It's not different than some random street gang going to war.

Yeah and instead they believe that rule by kings an emperors is good and right. Murdering the previous emperor and taking power in a bloody coup like the Romans loved to do was a perfect and flawless example of legitimate secular authority in Jesus's teachings.

I'm pretty sure it's well agreed that the Israelis murdered the ayatollah.

Do we know that for sure? Any source?

Yeah and instead they believe that rule by kings an emperors is good and right. Murdering the previous emperor and taking power in a bloody coup like the Romans loved to do was a perfect and flawless example of legitimate secular authority in Jesus's teachings.

Asking the peasants which liar should be the tyrant is at best hardly better. Obviously a better form of government can be / has been designed but mob rule is kept for bad reasons.

Who were the ancient Christians??? Who were they???

You're the one who keeps bringing them up.

That, and also the death penalty, and war. Apparently slaughtering Persian schoolgirls for no reason is a-ok but aborting a 2 month fetus is not. Weird.

I don't see how an accidental mistargeting of a school that used to be a military base due to outdated intelligence is in any way remotely comparable to intentionally killing a 2 year old outside of arguing in bad faith. Weird.

I don't see how an accidental mistargeting of a school that used to be a military base due to outdated intelligence is in any way remotely comparable to intentionally killing a 2 year old outside of arguing in bad faith. Weird.

The United States has slaughtered almost 400,000 civilians, many of them children, in Middle eastern countries since 2001.

If you looked at the source at all, you would see that the majority were slaughtered by the opponent of the Americans. You may argue that the conflict would not have happened without US intervention, but it was still the opponents who blew up those people.

And anyways I clicked through the source to look at some actual cases, I randomly clicked on Eighteen gay men and boys killed in Baghdad. I'm just gonna make a huuuge leap and guess that the Americans didn't have much to do with this.

If you looked at the source at all, you would see that the majority were slaughtered by the opponent of the Americans

Where does it say that?

There's literally a link you can click in the post, yet you continue mindlessly claiming that 100% of all civilian deaths in the conflict were caused by bloodthirsty Americans murdering them in cold blood.

I'm aware that Christians tend to not particularly like those either, if prompted, but there does not seem to be that much of an organised opposition

Bruh the UK Parliament just voted down an assisted dying bill that had been on the docket for two years with strong establishment and media support, after the bill had already been passed once by the House of Commons. I assume it was the Hare Krishnas fighting that campaign? I also fail to see the connection between euthanizing brain-damaged toddlers and whatever narrative you have about sex here, to the point where accusing others of a fixation on sex sounds awfully like projection. In the pro-life article linked there, there's not a single sentence about sex or sexuality, just a (surprisingly) matter-of-fact reporting of the law and the condition of the child (your problem seems to be that "the focus is instead squarely on the adults making the decision" - I suppose, in theory, they could have asked the now-deceased brain-damaged two-year-old for his/her opinion, but that seems difficult for multiple reasons).

Edit: I was going to make this point in another comment, but looking at the opening of yours I may as well make it here: it seems to me that a really obvious schelling point here is the difference between "pulling the plug"/moving to palliative care and actively killing someone. Obvious and natural place to put a fence on the slippery slope. For adults, I'd say let them fill out a form to get discharged from hospital with a bottle of Scotch and a pistol, but I have a feeling that might get abused by certain segments of the population.

What exactly was the UK bill about? "Assisted dying" in the culture-warred about, Canadian sense generally involves conscious people wanting to have themselves euthanised. That seems much more rare than the "braindead adult taken off life support" cases like Terri Schiavo (sp?), which seem more similar to this one. Those are also completely legal in the UK, and I have not seen OP or anyone else complain about instances of it in ages. You can dismiss the "controlling sexuality" theory as projection or otherwise all you want, but as I said that is not very compelling when you are not offering an alternative theory for why this is.

I wrote an edit about the difference between euthanizing someone and taking them off life support, but you may not have seen it. Incidentally, this is another issue that Christians have thought much harder about than people on the internet just kind of assume they have, cf. the Catholic doctrine of double effect and palliative care.

I will leave it to the Christian posters here to elaborate on how they see things, since I may get the exact points of their beliefs wrong (my personal answer would be, no, that's not how most Christians think, but also yeschad.jpg, women's (and men's) sexuality should be controlled by social norms and, to the extent practicable, the State). The guy you are making up in your head to get mad at certainly does exist, among Christians, atheists, Muslims, etc., but isn't particularly relevant to this discussion. What I understand Christians believe is that all human life is inherently valuable, as one of the highest gifts God gave us, and there are only a certain quite limited set of (almost entirely military/judicial) circumstances in which it is just to take a life. Their moral repugnance of murder is not just "it sucks for the guy who got murdered because it hurts a lot and he didn't want to be murdered", but that it is the snuffing out of something inherently extraordinarily valuable. Things get complicated around the natural end of life, but the suffering our bodies inflict on us is also considered to be a part of life, one that we endure because it in some way brings us closer to higher things. Generally, a good prior is that the group that's had the West's smartest minds thinking about things in their paradigm for almost two thousand years probably has a more developed theory of any given issue than something you heard about their beliefs from Jon Stewart or a social media dunk.

Honestly find this less objectionable than mid-pregnancy 'abortions of convenience', assuming that the medical assessment was reasonably accurate. Modern socialized medicine has a bunch of issues with 'we could stop X from dying but now have created a situation of unbounded medical expense and suffering'

Agreed. Modern medicine cannot cure everything. Sometimes accepting death is better than elongating the suffering.

assuming that the medical assessment was reasonably accurate.

Entirely vibes-based assessment, but given patterns about this, I anticipate such things will have a very, very low burden of proof to allow a "post-birth abortion," and it will eventually become legally-forbidden hate speech to question when socially awkward 5-year-olds are killed. Slippery slope perhaps, but I think the slope just is slippery.

True. Not denying the slope slipperiness but in this particular case I think it was reasonable from the evidence presented.

I don't think I quite fully appreciated what a house of horrors the Xu Bo case @georgioz posted there too was before, either.

I'd be curious to see some secular humanist or other arguments against them

I think the best version I can come up with is based on the following sketch. Humans form into self-integrated societies that have net-positive moral utility. Rights dependent on subjective or arbitrary thresholds have historically had enormous potential for abuse. For a functioning, high-performance society, we must have it be generally the case that people believe rights, including life, will generally be upheld. To form a stable equilibrium, we must therefore grant all humans basic rights and define the category of humans broadly so that "unpersoning" cannot become cover for abuse.

Right to bodily autonomy means the right to suicide. If we can't know whether someone wants suicide it's reasonable to ask their closest family and/or produce a reasonable-person estimate. I would want suicide it that body, so I find it to be consistent with rights that the baby was killed humanely.

Sure. I assume that most of the standard arguments against euthanasia, from whatever secular-humanist perspective I was sketching before, would still hold, though. For example, the state probably should not default to the presumption that someone would prefer euthanasia in the case of incapacitation. A strong presumption in favor of living seems embedded in any society that takes the right to life seriously. You also face a principal-agent problem when large medical expenses are involved, etc.

I think most of that framework is based on the idea that these norms are meant to preserve higher-order social functioning, rather than deriving solely from a single person's capacity or preference. Applying a sort of Rawlsian veil of ignorance to the question of what you would want if you were in that body seems plausible, but I'm not sure it's trivially demonstrable that, under the same veil, there wouldn't also be a preference for living in a society with an extremely high threshold for state-sanctioned killing. There may also be a similar veil-of-ignorance perspective in which you would not want to be placed in the position of deciding on, or carrying out, a state-sanctioned killing if you found yourself in the position of a parent or panel member.

A strong presumption in favor of living seems embedded in any society that takes the right to life seriously

Strong but not infinite. Merely strong can excuse it in this case.

I think most of that framework is based on the idea that these norms are meant to preserve higher-order social functioning, rather than deriving solely from a single person's capacity or preference.

This is contrary to the notion of human rights. Society is for humans, not the other way around. Society needs to serve human outcomes, like reducing suffering of horrifically diseased infants, to justify itsown higher order functioning.

Applying a sort of Rawlsian veil of ignorance to the question of what you would want if you were in that body seems plausible, but I'm not sure it's trivially demonstrable that, under the same veil, there wouldn't also be a preference for living in a society with an extremely high threshold for state-sanctioned killing. There may also be a similar veil-of-ignorance perspective in which you would not want to be placed in the position of deciding on

Sure, but this is a weighted sum that needs to be fine-tuned. It isn't obvious the answer is to always let horrific suffering continue on life support.

This child was born very prematurely, at only 26 weeks of gestation. It quickly became apparent that the child had suffered severe brain damage, resulting in severe cerebral palsy and a visual impairment. This was compounded by frequent and severe epileptic seizures, which were largely unresponsive to medication. This left the child restless and unable to sleep for long periods. The child also had mucus in its lungs, which made breathing and swallowing very difficult.

Given the cumulative effect of these conditions, it was clear that the child would not live to adulthood. The doctor also determined that the child's suffering could not be alleviated through medical treatment. The doctor and parents, therefore, decided to actively end the child’s life.

The committee concluded that the doctor acted with due care and made the right assessment. “All facets of ‘being human’—regarding motor skills, behavior, and personality—were severely impaired and were not going to improve,” the committee said. “Despite all medical and non-medical interventions, the parents and the doctor observed no improvement in the child’s condition and were convinced that the child was suffering unbearably and without prospect of relief.” It added that the doctor strictly adhered to all due-care requirements.

The Netherlands changed its euthanasia law in 2024 to allow for euthanasia on children between the ages of 1 and 12 under very strict conditions. These include that the child must be experiencing hopeless and unbearable suffering, there must be no other reasonable solution, and the doctor must have at least one other independent physician assess the case.

The original report mentions further (via Google Translate):

The epilepsy caused coughing fits and a swallowing disorder. In the months preceding the death, the seizures during mealtimes increased significantly.

The extensive brain damage had severe consequences for the child's functioning. There was a very severe developmental delay with an estimated developmental age of six weeks, while the child was nearly two years old. There was no verbal development whatsoever, and the cerebral visual impairment further limited the possibilities for any contact. Due to the combination of these conditions, only minimal communication with the child was possible. The child was severely multiply (intellectually and motorically) disabled, and the prognosis was that the child would remain dependent on care for life for all activities of daily living.

The extensive brain damage had severe consequences for the child's functioning. The child had sputum clearance issues, meaning that loosening and coughing up mucus from the lungs and airways was difficult, which, in addition to shortness of breath, poses a significantly increased risk of respiratory infections. The child's rattling breathing was clearly audible, and increasing shortness of breath was visible. Furthermore, the respiratory problems could worsen over time due to scoliosis. The doctor stated that the child exhibited an unsafe swallowing pattern, making it easy for the child to aspirate and for food or stomach contents to enter the airways, posing a risk of aspiration pneumonia (lung infection caused by aspiration). The likelihood of death at a very young age due to complications was considered very high.

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