27 August 2001

“France’s appeal court’s recent decision establishing a right not to be born, has sent shock waves round the world,” Graham Capill, Christian Heritage Party Leader, says. “The Nazi ‘master-race’ concept, it would seem, is alive and well.” he says.

Last November a lower court ruled that 17 year old French boy, Nicolas Perruche, had a right not to be born. Nicolas was born severely handicapped owing to his mother having contracted German measles while pregnant. It was claimed, because doctors failed to diagnose the illness, that his mother had had no opportunity to abort the child on account of the risk posed to her unborn child by German measles. Now France’s highest appeal court has upheld this decision, and Nicolas is suing the doctors for failing to terminate his life.

Apart from the sanctity of life argument, this perverted approach to disability, has widespread ramifications in medicine and the law. Doctors will be undoubtedly under much greater pressure to promote the abortion ‘option’ if they are in the least concerned that the foetus may have an even minor abnormality. Failure to give such advice may mean facing a legal challenge later, regardless of the fact that diagnosis in utero is often imprecise and sometimes totally inaccurate. The law then must determine the degree of culpability, depending presumably on the severity of the disability.

Mr Capill added, “It is extraordinary in this supposedly politically correct age, that the disabled are being made to feel so vulnerable, unwanted and lesser members of society, who should really never have been born. It is obvious, the more humanistic thought prevails, the more endangered life becomes.”

“God defend New Zealand from going any further down this path. Current politicians, judging on past performance, will have no mind to,” he concluded.

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