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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):
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."
Once again pro-life people post a scaremongering story about "Infanticide" and when I actually read the article it's about making what I regard to be a humane decision to end the suffering of an incredibly brain damaged child that couldn't live without invasive medical care. My filter bubble is reinforced and I will probably not waste my time reading details and just assume pro-lifers are omitting crucial context the next time this happens. Y'all should spend less time freaking each other about committee names and more time simulating your opponents viewpoints so you can select examples of overreach that might generate support from people who don't already agree with you.
What happens when someone decides the humane decision is sparing the world of you?
The essential point of it has always been that humanity is not equipped to render such a judgment. Legally protecting murder in narrow circumstances will inevitably progress to legally protecting murder in broad circumstances. Early abortion became allowing late abortion; murdering unborn children for medical concerns became murdering unborn children for the convenience of it all; murdering unborn children became murdering viable and crowning children, and now, though I am certain it has happened before, as was said would happen, an infant has been murdered "for cause" but what constitutes cause will not be left narrow. This played out exactly as was said would happen with physician-facilitated suicide: it would not stop with those in palliative care, it would and did expand to the psychologically unwell, and the medical systems of countries such as Canada would and do now recommend it.
A narrow but still arbitrarily qualified definition of whether a life is worth living will not stay narrow, and it hasn't.
There are tons of cases where real world institutions go partway down a "slippery slope", reap the benefits, and then engage in political contestation as the tradeoffs emerge. For example, building a state of any kind could be a slippery slope to communist dictatorship, and it is true that in some places at some times states have "slid" into becoming genocidal communist dictatorships (as some anarchists predicted). Are our only choices then anarchy or inevitable communist dictatorship? I am sure that many conservatives think the current American state has grown too large or perhaps "slid" towards communist dictatorship, and yet very few people endorse completely eliminating the possibility of this slide ever occuring by totally dismantling the American government and returning the continent to natural stateless anarchy. Here they trust that through normal political contestation we can stake out a position on the slippery slope of state power without becoming a communist dictatorship.
I think there are great reductions in suffering in letting terminal cancer patients die on their own terms and probably also to letting severely brain damaged two year olds with mucus filled lungs die as well. I don't like the state facilitating the death of severely depressed healthy people and if I were Canadian I would vote against that. But I see no reason why you can't have "cancer patients and people with profound chronic pain are allowed to opt into death" and "physically healthy 25 year old can't" as a policy.
I strongly suspect that pro-life people are not in agreement with me that it's valuable to reduce human suffering by allowing elderly cancer patients or severely brain damaged two year olds to die less painfully and find this repugnant on religious grounds. Instead of straightforwardly arguing that I should share their objections, they seem intent on persuading me that unlike many other policy issues where there are both benefits and potential overreach, this is a unique case where the outcome is inevitable. There are some jurisdictions that have slid towards abortion laws I think are objectionable and others where I think there have been long run equilibria I find pretty acceptable. The U.S. has restricted access in the past decade in many jurisdictions, this all seems like the normal process of contesting a policy with tradeoffs not an inevitable slide.
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