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Australian Committee Proposal to Pay Mothers Late Abortion Cost for Disabled Babies Compared to Nazis

By Hilary White

CANBERRA, November 13, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The Australian Parliamentary Group on Population and Development has been slammed by Queensland Senator Ron Boswell for holding to Nazi-style eugenic ideology on the abortion of disabled children.

“This revisiting of eugenics principles is repugnant to a society that prides itself on the contribution of all,” Boswell said.

The pro-abortion group had made a submission, signed by 41 Australian MPs, to the parliamentary committee that is examining the issue of abortion in Australia. The group said paying women a Medicare rebate for second-trimester abortions would save the government about $180,000 a year, due to the high costs of caring for handicapped babies who are allowed to be born.

Removing the abortion rebate, the group said, would place “emotional, physical, mental, and financial stress on families, denying women and couples the right to decide if they are equipped to raise a child with disabilities.”

According to Christian Today, so far 7 of the MPs whose names were affixed to the submission have disowned its statements about abortion and handicapped children.

Boswell heavily criticised the submission, saying that its “underlying premise” is based on eugenic principles that governments should prefer to kill the disabled rather than support them. He said it holds that “some lives are worth less than others because they will cost too much to support.”

“This is the kind of thinking that was typical of the Hitler regime. They set themselves up as judge of who deserved to live and who deserves to die.”

In the period leading up to the Second World War, the Nazi government of Germany began to implement its eugenics policies, meant to “cleanse” the German people of undesirable “racial traits.” This meant in practice the killing of those children, and later, adults, considered by the state to be genetically defective. Thousands of children and adults who suffered from mental and physical disabilities were starved and gassed to death and killed by lethal injection.

More recently, the utilitarian eugenics movement has gained popularity in scientific circles that propose to eliminate undesirable traits by killing those unborn babies, and, increasingly, newborns, who are found to be genetically deficient. Utilitarian philosophers and bioethicists like Princeton University’s Peter Singer, openly advocate for the killing of disabled children in the womb and as newborns.

Currently the abortion rate for babies with Down syndrome is estimated to be as high as 95% in many Western countries, indicating that modern utilitarian eugenics is already being implemented on a widespread scale.

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