How can one determine the quality of life when the kid hasn't had a chance to LIVE yet? If somebody says "autism is a mental disability" then they might justify euthanasia for an autistic baby or one that is suspected of being so.  :-(
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=569458&page=1

Is Euthanasia for Babies OK?
Who Decides When a Baby's Pain Is Too Great?
By MARC LALLANILLA
Mar. 11, 2005 - When is euthanasia for newborn babies a good idea?

Two doctors in the Netherlands believe they know. They have developed a checklist that would allow doctors and families to determine whether a newborn is suffering so greatly, and without hope of a cure, that death would be a mercy.

Writing in today's New England Journal of Medicine, Drs. Eduard Verhagen and Pieter J J. Sauer ask an important question: Are life-ending procedures for newborns acceptable, or should infants with severe disorders like spina bifida be kept alive even when their pain cannot be reduced?


Never an Easy Issue
The question is not a new one in medical circles. As the doctors themselves acknowledge, many infants' lives are ended each year in the Netherlands without any report to authorities.

Decisions to end life-prolonging treatment, or to not begin that treatment, are made regularly throughout Europe and the United States. In many cases, families wrestle with the issue by consulting with doctors and clergy. Authorities are not alerted and there is no media spotlight.

But situations like the Terri Schiavo case in Florida -- where the parents and husband of a severely brain-damaged woman have taken their fight over whether to withdraw her feeding tube to court -- reveal that euthanasia is never an easy issue to discuss, especially when it involves those who cannot speak for themselves.

The question of infant euthanasia is "part of appropriate pediatric medicine," said Glenn McGee, director of the Center for Medical Ethics Research at Albany Medical Center in New York state and editor of The American Journal of Bioethics.

"These babies are not being killed -- they are being appropriately cared for," McGee said. "Our society has gone off the edge in terms of protecting the vulnerable by forcing them to suffer."


Can Anyone Measure Pain?
But notions of suffering and quality of life are highly subjective and almost impossible to quantify. As Verhagen and Sauer write, "Suffering is a subjective feeling that cannot be measured objectively, whether in adults or in infants."

Dr. Ian R. Holzman, director of the newborn medicine program at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, has struggled with making a prognosis for newborns throughout his professional life.

"When I was younger I believed I had a 'prognostiscope' that could tell who would do OK and who wouldn't," said Holzman.

"I am much less sure now since I have seen infants with conditions thought to be dismal who have survived and gone on to have lives much better than predicted," he said. "Sure, they are the exception, but it is such exceptions that should give all of us pause."


Developing the Groningen Protocol
The procedural checklist developed by the two Dutch doctors, both from the University Medical Center in Groningen, outlines four strict conditions under which euthanasia be considered acceptable.

The parents must agree fully to euthanasia, and a team of doctors must also agree. The medical condition and the prognosis must be clearly defined. And after the decision has been made, an outside legal body should determine if the decision was justified and if all procedures were followed.

One of Verhagen and Sauer's motivations in developing their checklist, which they call the Groningen Protocol, is to address the cases of newborn euthanasia that go unreported every year.

"We believe that all cases must be reported," they write, "if the country is to prevent uncontrolled and unjustified euthanasia and if we are to discuss the issue publicly and thus further develop norms regarding euthanasia in newborns."


Are We Sliding Down a 'Slippery Slope'?
But even the careful development of protocols for euthanasia is unlikely to quell professional and ethical concerns.

"I am troubled by the active termination of life for conditions that many would consider neither hopeless nor filled with unbearable suffering," said Holzman.

"The practice reported and protocol advocated represent a significant slide down the slippery slope," said Susan M. Wolf, professor of law and medicine at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.

Wolf noted that many people born with spina bifida go on to lead highly productive lives.

"The supposed requirement of unbearable suffering seems actually to mean that doctors and parents project a poor quality of life in the future," she said. "Allowing euthanasia on those grounds should cause great concern."

This type of checklist and reasoning is used in the UK to turn off life support machines for adults, children and babies.
Many babies have already died from it, if a test could show autism in the womb or at birth, I believe that "decisions" would be made to euthanase them. Parents are often NOT given a choice, there have been high profile legal cases recently in the UK of doctors wanting to stop treating children and letting them die.

Presently in the UK a baby with down's can be aborted up til birth, 40 weeks gestation if requested, and a child that is downs can be given no life saving care, such as if they have heart problems from birth.

That's sad Amy. I know in the USA doctors take huge measures to save babies, mostly out of fear of lawsuits. If parents say otherwise, it seems as though they'll stop care. I read a book called "Baby ER" which is about the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit and it discusses the most severe cases...in the book (which is all true) the boy with Down's lives and his father commented "Now he gets to ride on the bus with me!" after hearing the baby is Down's. The father was a special education bus driver.

It won't happen in the USA because of the history.

It would be like what happened with Hitler in Germany.

How do we know the parents are given fully informed consent? Even after a perfectly normal birth, it is an emotional time. How much more so if something is found to be wrong with the child?

I think it is cruel to starve babies to death. We think it is horrible for Chinese people to dump female babies but then it seems to be accepted for disabled babies to be allowed to die slowly of hunger and thirst.

You aren't familar with Baby Doe, then?

http://www.pregnantpause.org/court/bowen-s.htm

http://www.affirminglife.org/issues/doe.asp

At least most of the sites  found were on anti-euthanasia sites. I suppose that some smal credit to our race...

I wouldn't be surprised if it happens in just about every country.  

Obviously, this is a very horrible and difficult choice for a parent to make. If it were my child, I would be thinking as much about what the child feels or will feel. I should point out that education is a big thing. A parent told "your child will be born with the same kind of neurological variations as Albert Einstein or Andy Warhol" will make a very different decision from those told their children will be writhing on the floor when they hear a prerecorded nursery rhyme.

And often it isn't possible to determine if a baby has autism until they are at least a few months old. In milder cases, a person might never receive a diagnosis of autism at all.

I think the hardest decision would be where the child is suffering from a degenerative condition that will result in a short life and painful death. If it were possible to give them an overdose of sedative, some parents would say yes with no hesitation. I don't know what I would say in this circumstance but I wouldn't like to see them suffer.  :?

I know. I would be utterly heartbroken if my child was going to die in crippling agony before he even began to recognise my face, but I would not be so cruel as to prolong it. On the other hand, if someone suggested to me that I should convince the mother to terminate because my boy will certainly be autistic, I would slap the person trying to do the convincing so hard their head would come off. I think what we are arriving at here is that different circumstances require different responses.

My Cousin Gary was born at 5 mos and weighed less than a pound because my Aunt had an appendicitis (sp?) attack during her pregnancy. He suffered pain that would have toped those charts in the early months and years of his life but nobody ever gave up on him (especially his Mom and the Neonatal Center in Huntington, CA). I am very proud to say he is 19, in college, smart as a whip, he has Cerebral Palsy, cute as a button (quite the lady killer- lol), uses a wheel chair to get around, he is sweet and kind beyond words. A true asset to this world. That's what I thought of when I read this.
-Rae

Yes, and it's very hard to know at birth just exactly what kind of life a child is going to lead. If I had given birth to a baby with problems, I'd have wanted honest information and not negative hype.

Unlike many other people, I have read up on medical issues for years. I was about 10 when I read a story in the Reader's Digest about a little boy in the USA who was allowed to starve to death because he had cerebral palsy and the parents were told he would not have any quality of life.

The story was called something like "Agonising Decision For Roger and Joanne Pell" and came from around the late 1960's. The parents were not given any hope at all - I don't know how severe the boy's lesion was but the parents at first wanted the doctors to operate to save him.

Surely euthinasia is impossable to be done on people who aren't old enough to decide they want to die?

Euthinasia, as I understand it, is suicide where the person doing the act needs help to kill themselves.

Involuntary euthinasia is, as far as I'm concerned, a contradiction in terms and therefore classifies as murder in my opinion.

NOOOOOO

Oregon is the only state that allows it too.