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Doctors would be justified to end the lives of some terminally impaired newborn babies, says a prominent Canadian bioethicist in a report that pushes the country’s euthanasia debate into provocative new territory.

Much of the discussion of physician assisted-death in Canada has centred around adult patients capable of making known how they want to end their lives.

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But Udo Schuklenk, a Queen’s University philosophy professor, argues that in rare cases of severely impaired, deeply suffering newborns, actively causing death is morally acceptable, if still illegal in this country.

“The parents should be able to freely decide on what would amount to postnatal abortion,” he argues in a paper just published in the Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery.

Euthanasia would even be preferable to “terminal sedation,” where food and liquids are removed from a dying patient, because it would save parents and medical staff the distress of seeing a baby waste away over days or weeks, said Prof. Schuklenk.