LIFE DIGEST: Australia rejects family with Down syndrome son
- Nov 4, 2008 - 1
An Australian government agency has denied a German doctor’s request for permanent residency because his 13-year-old son has Down syndrome.
Bernhard Moeller and his family moved to Australia two years ago for him to practice in a rural area of Victoria state that has a shortage of physicians.
The Department of Immigration and Citizenship rejected Moeller’s application for permanent residency because his son, Lukas, “did not meet the health requirement,” according to the department. An immigration department spokesman said Oct. 30 the rejection came because a medical official had determined Lukas’ condition “was likely to result in a significant and ongoing cost to the Australian community,” the Associated Press reported.
“This is not discrimination,” the spokesman said, according to AP. “A disability in itself is not grounds for failing the health requirement—it is a question of the cost implications to the community.”
American bioethics specialist Wesley Smith refused to accept the department’s claim.
“Of course it is discrimination. . . . If you think not, let’s try a mind experiment: Would Australia ever deny permanent residence to a family whose child had HIV? The outcry would be heard in the [United] States,” Smith wrote on his weblog.
“This is shameful eugenics, morally akin in my view to laws in the USA that barred disfavored nationalities and Jews in the years running up to World War II.
“This eugenic tide is flowing, not ebbing, and people with Down [syndrome] are prime targets; of eugenic abortion, of medical neglect after birth, of infanticide, of health care rationing, of futile care theory, and now of refused immigration,” Smith said. “Such are the consequences of rejecting human exceptionalism and embracing the bigotry intrinsic to the ‘quality of life’ ethic.”
Moeller said Oct. 31 he would appeal the decision.
“We like to live here, we have settled in well, we are welcomed by the community here and we don’t want to give up just because the federal government doesn’t welcome my son,” Moeller said, according to AP.
Down syndrome normally results when a person has three copies, rather than two, of chromosome 21. The condition typically is marked by mental and physical impairments. People with Down syndrome have a wide range of abilities.
Court went too far in Roe, Ginsburg says
Supreme Court Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has repeated her criticism of the Roe v. Wade decision, despite her support for abortion rights.
Ginsburg, 75, said Oct. 23 at Princeton University the Supreme Court went too far in 1973 when it invalidated all state laws prohibiting abortion.
“It would have been easy for the Supreme Court to say that the extreme cases are unconstitutional” without expanding the ruling to all states, Ginsburg said, according to The Daily Princetonian. “I never questioned the judgment that it has to be a woman’s choice, but the court should not have done it all.”
The suddenness and breadth of the opinion established a “perfect rallying point” for pro-life advocates and may have prevented discussion with state legislatures, said Ginsburg, who has criticized the Roe opinion in the past.
President Clinton nominated Ginsburg to the high court in 1993. She has voted to protect abortion rights while on the Supreme Court, even writing the dissent for a four-justice minority that opposed a 2007 decision upholding the federal Partial-birth Abortion Ban Act.
Singer speech shows bioethics’ radical bent
Controversial ethicist Peter Singer will speak next year at a student conference endorsed by America’s leading bioethics society, which demonstrates just how dire things are in that field, a bioethics specialist says.
Singer, a bioethics professor at Princeton University, will be the keynote speaker at an undergraduate conference in March at Harvard University, the newsletter BioEdge reported on its website Oct. 30. The conference is promoted and partially funded by the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities.
Singer infamously has endorsed legalized infanticide of sick babies, infants whose siblings need their body parts and 1 year olds with physical or mental impairments, according to World magazine.
“This validation of Singer by the most important bioethics society in the country illustrates the radical direction in which the field is increasingly going,” said bioethics commentator Wesley Smith on his weblog. “The answer, of course, is to never give up, but keep striving to let the greater population understand the wickedness that this way comes. . . . [O]ur hope lies in the common sense and decency of Main Street. The universities and similar environs are the problem, and are not likely to be the solution any time soon.”
Chinese mother kills daughter, escapes jail
A Chinese mother has escaped imprisonment despite confessing she killed her mentally impaired daughter.
Li Daohong, 47, received a suspended, three-year jail sentence from a Beijing court after acknowledging she poisoned and smothered her 20-year-old daughter, Xiao Fei, according to an Oct. 31 Reuters News Service report. The court said Li, 47, “spent great energy and money on the victim and the mounting psychological burden proved unbearable for her,” according to Reuters, which based its report on an article by the Xinhua news agency.
Li told the court she had depleted her finances during two decades of care for her daughter, according to the report. She took her daughter to a Beijing hotel, where she gave her more than 200 sleeping pills and smothered her with towels and a quilt while she slept.
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1 comments (post your own) feed
1 On Dec 12th, 2008, at 1:43am, Geff @ Paxil defects wrote:
Citizenship rejection should not be on the basis of somebody’s health conditions.What if a resident already living there suddenly comes to know that he’s suffering from a bad disease, then will he be thrown out of the country/state?
http://www.paxildefects.net