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What Belgium's child euthanasia law means for America and theConstitution



 
 
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Old March 29th 14, 11:38 PM posted to alt.autos.dodge,alt.autos.ford,alt.autos.gm,rec.autos.misc
Nancy Pelosi Unethical Profiteer
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Default What Belgium's child euthanasia law means for America and theConstitution

Legalized murder. Watch the libtards coin the term "post-birth
abortion" to describe murdering children.

Belgium has just passed a law allowing euthanasia for children.
The Low Countries allow for suicide and doctor-assisted suicide,
but Brussels is the first to open to door to dealing death to
children of any age.

If the prospect of youngsters being helped to off themselves
seems horrifying, do not worry – the law has “safeguards” to
ensure all the killing will be purely voluntary: a psychologist
has to certify that the child has “capacity or discernment” to
understand what they are doing.

Aside from its inherent significance, Belgium’s move requires us
to revisit Roper v. Simmons, the 2005 Supreme Court case that
ruled it inherently unconstitutional to apply the death penalty
to anyone under 18. European nations had long waged a moral
campaign against America’s allowance of the death penalty for 16-
18 year olds, which they called barbaric and savage.

After all, minors are not really responsible for their actions.
America was labelled a human rights violator, an international
outlier.

Finally, in Roper, the Court caved in to this pressure. Indeed,
it cited the European position as support for its conclusion –
other countries do not allow for such a thing.

Why can a 17 year-old rapist-murderer not face capital
punishment? Because, as Justice Kennedy wrote in a 5-4 decision,
science has shown that minors, even 17-year-olds, are too
immature to truly understand the consequences of their
decisions, or the meaning of life and death.

Juveniles are prone to “impetuous and ill-considered actions”
that they should not be made to lose their life for, even if the
action involved taking the life of another.” Moreover, juveniles
are susceptible to peer pressure, Kennedy wrote. (Of course, one
of the concerns in allowing euthanasia is external pressure from
doctors, parents and others.)

Yet now we see Belgium thinks kids are responsible enough; the
Netherlands similarly allows euthanasia as young as 12. These
countries may be the way of the future, as they have been in
other areas of progressive mores. Roper misread their belief
system.

It is not one of paternalistic concern for youth. Rather, a
system that permits the euthanasia of innocent 12 year-olds but
not the punishment of guilty 17-year-olds is one that exalts
autonomy without culpability.

Of course, with the juvenile death penalty, only a small
fraction of minors who committed capital crimes would be
sentenced to death. On a case by case basis, hosts of
psychologists, jurors, and judges would have to be convinced
that the particular defendant truly knew what they were doing.

So it comes out that the juveniles cannot really make
accountable decisions when it comes to killing people, unless it
is themselves. Or to put it differently, Belgium will not hold
children responsible when they hurt others, but gives them free
license to hurt themselves. Perversely, in Belgium, the youths
who are considered grown up enough to be euthanized have not
done anything wrong at all, unlike Simmons, who tied up his
victim and thew him off a bridge.

Belgium’s law shows the folly of basing constitutional decisions
on the practice of other countries: though we all eat at
McDonalds, American and Belgian notions of decency are
fundamentally different. In American, an age-unlimited
euthanasia law would be unthinkable, in Belgium it apparently
has 75 percent popular support. American intellectual elites
became uncomfortable being the only Western nation with a
juvenile death penalty; the Belgians do not blush at standing
out.

Roper was wrong to look across the seas, and the campaigners
against the 16-18 year old death penalty were wrong to accept
the conceit of European moral superiority and American ugliness.
But to the extent that Roper did base its decision on a
theoretically unified consensus about juvenile responsibility,
Belgium’s action, which may be followed by other northern
European countries, gives an occasion to overrule it.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-
conspiracy/wp/2014/02/13/belgiums-kiddie-euthansia-law-and-roper-
v-simmons/

******

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