More Doctors Say "Choose Death"

In a magnificent one-two, the British Morbidity Association have decided not to call for a decrease in the 24-week abortion limit. They also decided, in the BBCs tasteful euphemism, "to drop their opposition to changes to the law which would allow terminally ill patients to be helped to die."

The debate on abortion showed the caring profession at its best.

Keith Brent, a paediatrician, told the Manchester conference a reduction in the legal limit would compel him to attempt the resuscitation of premature babies with extremely poor prospects of leading a normal life.

"There is no point in forcing me, my staff, mothers and babies to go through that."

Instead the babies will go through ....

"I don't want the BMA to be allied to the violent pro-life groups and their shameful persecution of women who have reached really difficult moral decisions," said junior doctor Jenny Blackwell.

In contrast to the violence of groups like Life and SPUC, abortion is such a peaceful procedure. It hardly hurts the mother at all.

While I find this all very depressing, it's inevitable in a post-Christian society. Where once the Church was the final arbiter of morality (and the Church was extremely pro-life, to the point where attempted suicide was an imprisonable offence), the decline of Christianity has left a power vacuum.

Who is capable of taking such decisions, on life and death ? You would need great self-confidence, and a conviction of your own righteousness which is almost like arrogance. Where can such qualities be found ?

Step forward the lawyers and the doctors.

We're in the middle stages of a long and slippery descent here. We've been killing babies since 1967 - six million so far. We've only started starving people to death in the last 20 years - and not just people with brain injuries like Tony Bland. A little bit of starvation can help clear a ward of those bed-blocking dementia cases.

It's now the view of the Department of Health that doctors should be able to withhold food and water from perfectly conscious, articulate patients.

Should be some interesting scenes in the next twenty or thirty years as the baby-boomers, the Sixties children, approach senility. This last cohort of hideously white Britons will discover for themselves that ideas have consequences.