Columbia Flirts with Child Euthanasia

Child euthanasia is being seriously proposed in Colombia, where a bill introduced by Liberal party congressman Juan Carlos Losada proposed, among other things, that children ages six and older who have “a serious and incurable illness or bodily injury that causes intense physical or mental suffering” can be killed—or, put more euphemistically, can be eligible for a “medically assisted death.”

It is important when discussing these things that we emphasize what is actually meant here: a “medically assisted death,” in this context, is a doctor killing a child via lethal injection. This was notoriously carried out by the Nazis at the start of World War Two, where eugenic mania combined with paganism and the memory of the allied blockade that starved at least 200,000 healthy German children to death after the November 1918 Armistice to produce the elimination of 'useless mouths'.

The bill doesn’t start at the top of the slippery slope—it begins at the bottom, emphasizing that “it’s not necessary, nor will it be required, to prove the existence of a terminal illness or a medical prognosis of imminent death.” This means that children who are not dying can be killed because adults decide that their lives are not worth living. If passed, it would mean that children who are not dying will be killed for a variety of reasons—and that those suffering disabilities that others deem unbearable will likely be among the victims. 

As reported by the Catholic News Agency, the Pro-Life Caucus of Colombia’s Congress is stridently opposing the legislation, with debate on the bill beginning on November 29. The Pro-Life Caucus, which has more than sixty members, called it “a new attack against the Colombian family” and on Twitter expressed their “total disagreement with the aim of legalizing euthanasia for children in our country, even more so without the consent of their parents and in cases in which the disease is not in a terminal phase.” The proposed law, they pointed out, contains “provisions that ignore the State’s responsibility to provide, as a priority and in a timely manner, the care required by minors.”