The new killing fields are hospitals and health clinics.

It is government that gives them this power. Government, it turns out, gets used to having this power over your life or even worse, that of your beloved baby boy.

Charlie Gard’s daddy pleaded with the British judge for a chance at life for his son, who suffers from a rare genetic disorder. Charlie “should not have to die because he will not be like another little boy.”

“Please,” he begged the judge, “give him a chance.”

Instead last week Judge Nicholas Francis ruled: “It is in Charlie’s best interests” that “Great Ormond Street may lawfully withdraw all treatment save for palliative care to permit Charlie to die with dignity.” Charlie’s parents are appealing the ruling. Charlie’s death sentence is stayed for a few weeks.

Parents Connie and Chris hold baby Charlie in this undated photo.

When I first tweeted this story (@MaggieGallaghe) most of my American followers assumed it was the story of national health insurance and death panels.

No, it’s worse than that. Charlie’s parents had started a GoFundMe campaign. They raised more than $1.5 million from 80,000 donors for an experimental treatment in the United States.

But instead the doctors intervened and requested the power to pull the plug on Charlie. Loving parents asked for their natural right to try everything to save their son’s life. Instead the judge ruled they had no say in their own baby’s medical care.

The State Becomes Lord of Life and Death

The law began by stepping in to protect children from abusive parents. Today in Great Britain the government chose death for a baby with two parents, whom the judge himself described as showing “absolute dedication to their wonderful boy, from the day that he was born.”

Government gets used to taking away our natural rights. Sometimes the slope is slow and gradual and sometimes it’s a rapid slip and slide.

Charlie Gard

In the Netherlands for example, doctors have gotten used to killing. At first doctors only helped kill the dying in great physical pain. But in short order, doctors made “unbearable suffering” of any kind a good reason to kill. And the government let them. In 2012 an End of Life clinic opened up to “help” patients whose own physicians refuse to kill them. In the first year alone clinic doctors helped kill 11 people whose only recorded complaint was they were “tired of living.” Half of Dutch patients who were killed at this clinic said in part they suffered from “loneliness.” Sure, a dose of cyanide seems a reasonable cure.

In just ten years, the number of cases of death-by-doctor tripled. One out of 30 deaths in the Netherlands is now doctor-assisted, claiming close to 5,000 people.

America’s abortion rate alone means doctors killed more than one out of 3 people who died in 2014.

Of course the real number of deaths by doctors is much higher, for that ignores the almost 31,000 aborted babies in the latest Dutch data. Doctors are responsible for almost 1 in 4 deaths in the Netherlands.

Doctors Playing God

From that perspective, the situation is even worse here in the United States. Doctor-assisted suicide is now legal in 5 states, including the heavily populated California. Good statistics are not yet available. But our abortion rate alone means doctors killed more than one out of 3 people who died in 2014.

We may not yet have gotten used to the idea a judge can tell fit and loving parents they may not spend their own money to save their child. But we’ve grown used to being part of the vast killing fields of the West that makes health clinics the most dangerous place to be.