When politicians and medical doctors create a test for determining whose life has value, more and more of us will fail.
“All facets of ‘being human’ — regarding motor skills, behavior, and personality — were severely impaired and were not going to improve.”
Those were the words of a Dutch review committee explaining why a doctor had acted properly in ending the life of a child who was not yet two years old.
In 2024, the Netherlands opened euthanasia to children between ages one and twelve; this was the first case since the law had been expanded.
The committee’s report, which was published this month, found that the doctor acted with due care.
This did not happen in a vacuum. The first legal killing of a toddler in the Netherlands, the hung jury in the Lindsay Clancy case, and a longstanding but little-known Canadian statute enabling infanticide are not three separate debates. They are three horrors saying the same thing: A child’s life is no longer sacrosanct. Instead, it is weighed against function, parental capacity, and adult suffering.
These three cases reveal three truths we must understand about this view of humanity.
1. Once Human Value Is a Checklist, the Vulnerable Won’t Make the Cut.
“It is as easy to take away a man’s wife or baby as to take away his beer when you can say ‘What is liberty?’; just as it is as easy to cut off his head as to cut off his hair if you are free to say ‘What is life?’”
–G.K. Chesterton, “Eugenics and Other Evils”
Born at just 26 weeks, 3 days’ gestation, the boy faced serious complications from birth. He developed cerebral palsy, a severe form of infant epilepsy, and vision impairments.
Doctors said the boy’s developmental age hadn’t progressed past six weeks due to damage to his brain. The seizures, and the side effects of drugs used to treat them caused difficulty sleeping, mucus in the lungs, and difficulty swallowing.
His parents had numerous conversations with the attending physician about euthanasia and eventually decided to proceed. He told them that the child’s condition would not improve and that their child would die at an early age. The committee wrote that the child was “suffering unbearably and without prospect of relief.”
By law, the doctor needed to get another opinion. The first doctors consulted outside his region did not find continuous unbearable suffering. The epilepsy brought “significant discomfort,” they determined, but the seizures were not constant.
They suggested palliative care and pharmacological intervention, which the attending doctor claimed he had tried and the side effects had made the child’s condition worse.
He consulted another physician who affirmed his diagnosis, saying that the “child’s unbearable suffering was clearly visible.”
At not quite two years old, the boy was euthanized.
After a review to determine if this was the “right” thing to do, the committee sided with the physician, concluding, “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.”
But Dutch law doesn’t require consent from the child to be euthanized. The boy couldn’t have consented; he was two and he could not speak. He wasn’t killed because he wanted to die or because he expressed that he was suffering continuously. He was killed because men with clipboards got to determine if he was sufficiently human.
As C.S. Lewis wrote of the Conditioners in The Abolition of Man, “They are, if you like, men who have sacrificed their share in traditional humanity in order to devote themselves to the task of deciding what ‘Humanity’ shall henceforth mean.”
2. We Already Excuse the Killing of a Child in Favor of Adults’ Mental Health.
“The logical sequel to the destruction of what are called ‘unwanted children’ will be the elimination of what will be called ‘unwanted lives.’”
–Malcolm Muggeridge, “What the Abortion Argument is About”
For weeks, the country has been consumed with the case of Lindsay Clancy, a mother who admitted strangling her three children. We won’t rehash the details here. The central dispute was not over whether Clancy killed her children but over her mental state when she did so.
The entire debate centered around her mind and whether she was a victim.
A jury of her peers nearly acquitted her. If not for one male juror, they would have.
Kellie Farina, one of the jurors, lamented that the holdout juror “had the hardest time getting off the fact that Lindsay viciously killed her children.”
Another member of the jury, Paula Devlin, said, “Even though we didn’t know what was going on outside of our little bubble that we were in, we knew that this was a turning point, and this would be something that could change something to make it better for other women in the future, for other families.”
Foreperson Roni Carlson stated, “I was so sad, so sad that we couldn’t come up with a verdict for Lindsay.” That “verdict for Lindsay” would have allowed her to eventually return to society as if she had never had or killed three children.
The Clancy trial also renewed attention on a long-forgotten Canadian law that carries a maximum prison sentence of just five years when a mother kills her child before the child’s first birthday if it is determined that the mother’s mind was “disturbed” by the effects of giving birth or lactation.
An article published by the publicly funded Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) asked, “How different would Lindsay Clancy’s murder trial look if it happened in Canada?”
The article pondered if defendants like Clancy are treated too harshly by the criminal justice system in the United States.
It then cited Isabel Grant, a University Killam Professor in the Allard School of Law at the University of British Columbia, who stated, “Women who kill as a result of not recovering from childbirth should not face life imprisonment — that doesn’t really serve anyone’s interests if there was truly a postpartum illness at play.”
But while Canada’s infanticide law could potentially have applied to Clancy’s youngest child, Callan, who was still four months from celebrating his first birthday, her two older children, Cora and Dawson, fell outside the statute.
Grant called that limitation “a shortcoming in the Canadian law.”
The law isn’t new. It was enacted in 1948, amended in 1955, and survived subsequent legal challenges.
But no one should be shocked by either the Clancy case or the Canadian justification for infanticide. Once the value of a child’s life is weighed against the suffering, circumstances, or desires of adults, the child’s right to life is no longer intrinsic. It has become conditional.
3. The List of Who Has Value Will Keep Shrinking Until We Refuse the Test.
“Either life is always and in all circumstances sacred, or intrinsically of no account; it is inconceivable that it should be in some cases the one, and in some the other.”
–Malcolm Muggeridge, “Something Beautiful for God”
Euthanasia is one debate in which the slippery-slope argument is used most often and with good reason.
Over the past decade, we have watched that progression unfold.
The Netherlands expanded euthanasia to cover children who cannot consent, even as a government-commissioned study found that hundreds of adult patients had been euthanized without consent.
Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) program was initially limited to those whose natural death was reasonably foreseeable. Its eligibility requirements have since expanded to be for anyone who can’t foresee their life quality getting any better. And so, the number of deaths has grown exponentially. According to the most recent report, MAID accounted for 5.1 percent of deaths in Canada in 2024.
Parliament is still debating whether or not to expand it to include children.
Belgium, France, and a growing list of other nations have also legalized euthanasia.
In the U.S., 13 states and the District of Columbia allow physician-assisted suicide.
And as boundaries expand, the people placed at the greatest risk are often the most vulnerable: children, the poor, the disabled, and those suffering from mental illness.
No one should be surprised. Consider the words of Eduard Verhagen, a professor of pediatric palliative care at UMCG in Groningen, who praised the Dutch committee’s findings: “You aren’t trained for it, and there is a huge threshold to cross. Yet, sometimes you reach the point where you do cross that threshold.”
Doctors aren’t trained to kill their patients; they are trained to heal them. And when they start doing the opposite, a threshold is crossed indeed.
Once we crossed the threshold of deciding whose life has no value and who has the right to take that life — whether under the flag of eugenics or under the promises of kindness and dignity — we have surrendered the principle that every human life possesses inherent worth.
But human worth is not ours to assign. It does not rise with intelligence, independence, health, or usefulness, and it doesn’t diminish with disability, suffering, age, or dependence. Human life is sacred because every human being is made in the image of God.
The two-year-old boy in the Netherlands did not possess less humanity because he could not speak, walk, or live independently. He did not fail the test for being human.
The test failed him.
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