I saw the headline and about fell out of my chair. “Netherlands hospital euthanizes babies.” Are you kidding me? I thought baby killing was the one thing we could all agree was the epitome of wrong. The country of windmills and wooden shoes has now become a country where infanticide is OK.

Groningen Academic Hospital has come up with a set of guidelines in regard to the mercy killings of newborns. In the same breath, the hospital also announced such killings had already taken place in expectation of the announcement.

However, the hospital did more than decide its doctors could take on the role of God in deciding which infants should live and which deserved to die. The mere fact that it began killing babies before regulations had already been put in place demonstrates the wide-open door for the practice to be abused.

The hospital’s guidelines, known as the Groningen Protocol, direct a newborn’s medical team to consult with independent doctors and the baby’s parents to decide if euthanasia is the best option. The doctors must be able to agree that there is no way for the child to be in less pain and no hope of improvement.

It is incredible to me that in the day and age in which diversity and uniqueness are crowned king and intolerance are crowned the worst kind of sin that a hospital would be so intolerant of a newborn simply because he or she was different. Individuality is held in such high esteem because every person has infinite value and worth simply by nature of being human.

How can we then, in the same breath, become the arbiters and judges about whether a baby has the right to live or die just because his or her situation seems hopeless?

In the past four years, a handful of cases of child euthanasia have been reported to the Justice Ministry in the Netherlands. Four cases were reported in 2003, two in 2002, seven in 2001 and five in 2000. In its attempts to consider all ideas, the Netherlands have gone too far.

Europe has increasingly moved toward the secularization of its society, moving away from absolute moral values and instead toward personal morality that has little effect on government or the public sphere. Religious beliefs and morals have been regulated to the private lives of individuals and taken out of society at large. As a result, what do we have? Baby killing is OK, as long as you have a good reason.

In previous cases of legal euthanization, the consent and request of the patient was essential. Adult euthanasia laws have been enacted in the Netherlands, neighboring Belgium and the state of Oregon. Baby euthanasia is fundamentally different because the child cannot consent to his or her own killing.

The value of life seems to be increasingly under attack. From Roe v. Wade in 1973 to legal euthanasia in the Netherlands in 2001 to cloned human embryos in South Korea in 2004, we continue to see a disturbing trend that leaves behind the idea that we are each valuable and special because God has created us.

Wesley J. Smith, an attorney for the International Task Force on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide, said “the slippery slope in the Netherlands has descended already into a vertical cliff.” These words best sum up the effects of continuing to pursue a world lacking moral absolutes. We call it a human rights violation when China kills female babies because it would rather have males, but euthanizing babies without regard to his or her sex is fine.

The line between right and wrong continues to thin. The once unquestionable moral abomination of baby killing has been championed as the next advancement of the human race in the land of windmills and wooden shoes.