Russia Today
February 3, 2010
The article titled “Finish it off so it doesn’t suffer,” which calls for the euthanasia of disabled newborn children, has caused public outrage in Russia and has led to fierce debates in the blogging community.
In the article under question, the author says that “the killing of the newborn is in fact the same as an abortion or super-late term abortion” and calls disabled newborns “defective blanks” and “newborn idiots”. He states that depriving disabled infants of life is “true humanism”.
The Union of Russian Journalists has accused the author of the article of breaching professional ethics.
The Union Board’s criticism comes from the fact that, instead of discussing the right for free choice of a disabled newborns’ fate, the author claims the only rational way is to deprive them of life. The board concluded that the article entrenches upon extremism.The board added that the author of the article should have realized that he is humiliating people who are already bringing up disabled kids.
“The author is not raising a disabled child – that is why his generalized conclusions about the life of disabled people and their families… are just speculations. As a mother of a disabled child, and based on my experience, I state that these speculations have nothing to do with the reality,” said Svetlana Shtarkova, who, along with another disabled child’s mother, Snezhana Mitina, has written a letter to the Union of Russian Journalists’ Board.
According to statistics, there are 545,000 disabled kids in Russia. Only 12.2% of them live in foster homes, 23.6% of these children have various organ diseases and/or metabolic disorders, 23.1% have motor disabilities, and 21.3% have mental disabilities.
