Sarah Palin's concern about a "death panel" which decides who gets treatment should be taken seriously. If Britain's experience is anything to go by, as a loving mother, Mrs Palin is right to worry about health-care rationing and the long-term interests of Trig, her baby son, who has Down's Syndrome, in an anti-life political environment.Only yesterday, the Guardian newspaper reported that the UK's National Health Service (NHS) was "developing a simple blood test that could save the lives of hundreds of unborn babies". However, the real purpose of the blood test, known as non-invasive prenatal diagnosis (NIPD), becomes clearer as the article proceeds - to search more efficiently for disabled babies, including Down's Sydrome babies, over 90% of whom will be aborted.
In 2005 the British Government went to the trouble of working out the cost to the country of prohibiting the abortion of disabled babies. They announced:
"The extra cost to care for disabled children is estimated at £5 million a year ... An approximate estimate of the additional cost (excluding normal living costs) to care for 240 severely disabled children is likely to be of the order of £4 million a year ... and it is assumed that the extra costs to care for 240 moderately disabled children about be about a quarter of this cost (£1 million.)"The British Government went on to outline the overall financial benefit to the National Health Service of maintaining Britain's permissive abortion legislation as follows:
" ... The option also saves the NHS the cost of funding 185,000 maternity events, estimated at £576 million a year, based on an average total cost of £3,117 per birth, which gives the NHS a net saving of £500 million, if the cost of NHS funded abortions (£76 million) is deducted ... "Negative attitudes to those with disability permeate the health system in Britain. Last month, Lady Jane Campbell, who has spinal muscular atrophy and is 50 years old ...", spoke about the struggle she and her husband had to convince doctors to provide her with necessary life-saving treatment when she was rushed to hospital at the brink of death with acute respiratory problems.
''Those of us who know what it is to live with a terminal condition are fearful the tide has already turned against us,'' Baroness Campbell warned in a House of Lords debate on assisted suicide in July.
Maybe Sarah Palin's maternal instinct is telling her that the tide is turning against the disabled in Obama's America. Given his commitment to killing innocent human lives, this would hardly be surprising.
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