This is the Kind of Society Abortion is Creating: Do We Still Want to Be Us?

From the Globe and Mail, a heartbreaking story of what a woman has to endure in this age of a "woman's right to choose," which of course really means "a woman's duty to choose abortion."

"A word to the wise to those of you dying to ask a parent of a child with Down syndrome, spina bifida or an open neural tube condition if they had prenatal testing: Don’t do it. Bite your tongue. Shut up. Swallow it.

Because what you are really asking us is, “Why didn’t you abort your child?” And, similarly, “Why is this child even alive right now?”

Believe me, justifying the very existence of our beloved children hurts. It will not gain you any brownie points on the playground or when I’m writing up my Christmas card list.

A while back, funny things were happening to my son, who happens to have Down syndrome, in his preschool class.

Aaron went to his neighbourhood preschool, not to a special-ed site. I believe that inclusion in his community is the best thing for him. As his mother, I make decisions based on what is best for him. Other families make other decisions for their children. I’m not into judging since I got thrown off my pedestal of judgment when Aaron was born six years ago. But inclusion is the choice for us.

The problem with inclusion isn’t with the children. It is with a select few parents, who grew up in the era of special-education schools and segregation. They are scared of my kid. And they pass that fear on to their children.

A kid came up to Aaron, and shouted in his face, “Why is Aaron different?” (For some reason, little kids like to shout when they talk.)

Fair enough. We are all different, kid. Some kids have glasses. Some kids have dark skin. Some kids have earrings. See what I mean? This is easy enough to explain to children.

But then another kid said, “My mom says I have to be nice to Aaron because he is different.”

Now, this is a comment coming from a parent, through a kid. We don’t want your faux sympathy, folks. We want our kid to be accepted as part of a diverse classroom. With different skin colours, genders and abilities. Is a kid going to shout in another kid’s face, “My mom says I have to be nice to Johnny because he’s black”? I hope not.

But intellectual disabilities or developmental delays or mental differences are the last stance for discrimination.

I sat down and wrote a nice letter to the preschool parents. The teacher, who has been nothing but welcoming of Aaron over the past two years, happily handed it out.

The letter explained Aaron and his family. How he is the same as other kids. How he likes construction trucks and swimming. How we are all different in this world. Read between the lines and what I’m saying is that there is no such thing as perfect.

After the day we handed out the letter, a mom stopped me in the playground on my way to my car. She chit-chatted a bit, then said she was surprised by the letter. I said I was hoping if I explained a bit about Aaron it would help foster understanding. I was thinking she was the one who told her kid she had to be nice to Aaron because he’s different.

Then she got to her point. She really wanted to know why I didn’t get prenatal testing.

I looked at her, puzzled. It seemed like a funny question to ask, and staggeringly inappropriate to boot, but I had been asked it before. It was in a mom-and-baby yoga class when Aaron was only four months old. The sting of it then had not lessened almost five years later.

I thought, rationally, “Here’s your chance to educate – I am an ambassador against ignorance.” I answered her cheerily, “Well, testing wouldn’t have changed my pregnancy outcome, so I turned the testing down.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see my car in sight. It was my escape hatch, but it was several metres away. I had to immediately extract myself from this conversation because I felt as if I was floating above my own body.

I said my (pleasant) goodbyes and motored to my vehicle as fast as I could in the winter snow. I slid into the driver’s seat, slumped over the steering wheel and burst into tears. I’m not much of a crier. But it was as if I had been slapped.

I continued crying all morning in parking lots in between running errands. I cried in the coffee shop drive-through and in the grocery store lineup. I had to bite my lip to prevent the tears from falling down my face in public.

Why do I have to justify my son’s very existence? Why isn’t it okay that he’s alive? What are you afraid of?

For those of us who have children whose extra chromosomes could have been detected prenatally, it is a long and lonely road. We get asked these questions. We get frantic calls from friends who are considering amniocentesis because their triple-screen prenatal test has come back elevated. The whole genetic testing thing is fraught for parents who have kids with disabilities.

One day it won’t just be “us.” With the clever mapping of genes, there may be tests for all the lovely imperfections of life that make us human. All in the quest for the blue-ribbon baby.

What I should have asked the mom in the playground was, “What if your daughter was in a car accident tomorrow and had a brain injury? Would you love her any less?”

When you can answer those questions, I will answer your questions."

If you support legalized abortion, don't even think about not taking responsibility for training that mother who asked if the mother of the Downs child if she had had prenatal testing. That is what abortion on demand does: it trains us to think of the child as a commodity we control by our choice.

It dehumanizes all of us, not just the disabled. Actually they are the most fortunate among us for to be intellectually or physically disabled does not imperil our eternal salvation, whereas to be morally disabled does.

12 Reasons why Abortion is the Most Important Moral Issue of the 21st Century

The Culture of Death says that human life is cheap and can be discarded when not wanted. The Gospel of Life says that human life is created in the image of God and must be cherished and protected in every possible way. Our culture faces a choice between life and death.

The right to life is the most fundamental and important of all human rights and no other human rights are possible without it. There can be no feeding of the hungry, no clothing of the poor, no visiting of the prisoners and no offering a cup of cold water to those who are murdered before birth. No one can be truly concerned for the poor, the weak, the helpless, the elderly, the frail, the handicapped, the minority, the economically disadvantaged or the victims of discrimination who is not pro-life. It makes no sense to be anti-war or anti-capital punishment while being indifferent to the murder of the weakest and most helpless among us. All social justice issues begin with the issue of abortion.

Some would have us believe that abortion is “just another issue” to be horse-traded in the cut and thrust of party politics. But the fact is that abortion on demand is a central issue one for those who are advancing the agenda of the Culture of Death. It is nothing less than legalized private killing and is the key to many other anti-humanistic behaviors, principles and policies. Abortion is far from being a single, stand-alone issue. It reveals a mindset that is deeply pathological and it reflects a society that is altogether too passive, resigned, tired and apathetic when it comes to resisting evil. Abortion sets a precedent for taking other forms of human life.

1. Euthanasia - the next issue to debate after abortion on the list of those promoting the Culture of Death is euthanasia. If pre-born human life is of no value and not worth protecting, then the elderly and the sick are at great risk. Euthanasia presupposes that human life is no different from animal life and that what is acceptable and humane for animals must be acceptable for humans. The principle of the sanctity of human life is at stake. We need to remember that some people have just as great (or greater) financial incentives to kill their parents as they do to kill their preborn children.

2. Infanticide – Many people believe infanticide is “no big deal” but Roman Catholics and Evangelical Christians, along with many others from all religions and no religious backgrounds, beg to differ. It is an issue of murder. No one can explain why it is all right to kill a baby one minute before birth, but not one minute after birth. Abortion on demand – which is the law in the US and Canada – is a certain prelude to infanticide. The Greco-Roman culture that early Christianity confronted (and converted) practiced infanticide by exposure. Christians would go out to the garbage heaps of Rome to save children. One could even argue that abortion is just a technologically advanced form of infanticide.

3. The Silent War Against Black People – More black babies are aborted than white ones – proportionately. Planned Parenthood often locates their abortion facilities near black inner city neighborhoods. The founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger, was a eugenicist who favored limiting births among the “inferior races” and Planned Parenthood carries on her racist program of eugenics today. People of African descent in North America know that many white people wish they would just go away; abortion is one of the methods used to implement that wish.

4. The Silent War Against Girls - Abortion is legalized private killing and baby girls are more vulnerable than baby boys. For many social and financial reasons, parents often choose to abort a girl so they can try for a boy. In countries like China and India this practice is so wide-spread that it is now beginning to cause many social problems due to a shortage of women, but it is increasingly common in the West as well. No one can be a true Feminist who fails to oppose the killing of babies just because they are female.

5. The Silent War Against Handicapped People - About 90% of Down Syndrome babies are now killed before birth in the US. What is this but blatant, unjust discrimination against the handicapped? This is a very new phenomenon based on recently-developed pre-natal genetic testing. How can we as a society expect to nourish a respect for the handicapped among us if we allow this evil attitude to take root that killing one’s child just because he or she does not measure up to our standard of perfection is morally acceptable? The sympathy accorded parents who abort handicapped babies is appalling and parallels the sympathy accorded to Nazis who launched their euthanasia program against the handicapped in the 1930’s.

6. The Corruption of the Medical Profession – The introduction of legalized abortion into Western societies required that Hippocratic Oath taken by doctors for over two millennia had to be revised. Doctors renounced their oaths to “do no harm” and added killing to their job description. For centuries, doctors have been trusted precisely because they always refused to get involved in taking life, even when pressured by the state to become executioners, for example. As doctors become desensitized to killing, patient trust will decline and we all will be worse off as a result. This affects people who have no direct involvement in abortion, euthanasia or other culture of death practices.

7. The Corruption of the Law – Western law has gradually been reformed over centuries to prohibit the legalized private killing of individuals by other individuals in power over them. Once under Roman law the Patriarch of a household held the power of life and death over members of his household. This was abolished under Christianity. The same goes for the right of the White slaveholder to kill the slaves he owned. The same goes for the right of Lords under feudalism to kill those under their authority. At various times and in various ways, the Christian West abolished all right of private killing. But in the second half of the Twentieth century legalized private killing made a comeback as mothers gained the “right” to kill their children. Soon children will have the “right” to have their parents killed under euthanasia laws. The principle of the inviolable right to life as the foundational human life is being eroded.

8. Eugenics – Eugenics is a group of humans taking control of the future evolution of the human race to make is in their own image. For example, the eugenics movement of the early Twentieth century was widespread and powerful in all Western countries and one branch of it motivated Nazi campaigns of forced sterilization, killing of “useless eaters” and cruel medical experiments in the death camps. Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, was a leader in this movement and sought to use sterilization, contraception and abortion to decrease the “breeding potential” of inferior races like African Americans. Eugenics is scientific racism combined with violence.

9. Cloning people for Spare Parts, i.e. So-called “Saviour Siblings” – This was recently legalized in the UK by the Labour Party. To bring human beings into the world just for the purpose of taking their organs out of them to transplant into another person is sick, evil and demonic. At this moment, the idea of aborting a fetus to harvest its organs or tissue to save a sibling is considered ethical by many people. Abortion is essential to people with this mindset. The novel Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro, is about children raised for no purpose other than to have their organs harvested at the cost of their lives. It is unbearably sad and morally repulsive both at the same time. This is the “Brave New World” into which the Culture of Death leads and abortion is an absolutely necessary step on the road to get there.

10. The Choice Women Need - and deserve is not just the “choice” to kill their babies or be on their own raising them. The pro-abortion forces are not really pro-choice. If they were they would have better responses than just abortion and welfare for women in crisis pregnancies. They would support women who choose to carry and place for adoption. They would support women who choose to carry and raise the child. They would understand that most women want to bear the children they conceive, but find the deck stacked against them and abortion the expected thing to do. We should not let men off the hook and let it be simply the woman’s problem. Women deserve better.

11. Abortion on Demand Only Benefits Predatory Males - who are not prepared to take their responsibility as fathers. If we really cared about women and children we would demand that men take responsibility for their actions and we would stop treating women like sex objects for males who pervert sex into something selfish and superficial. The culture of abortion is great for men who want to pressure women into having sex and it is great for men who want to exit the scene once the natural result of sexual intercourse occurs. But it is not great for women or for children or for society as a whole.

12. Demographic Suicide – Almost 60 nations of the world currently are not reproducing themselves and world population is set to age rapidly and start declining during the 21st century. When a wealthy nation refuses to have enough babies even to maintain the population and thereby chooses to die out, one has to wonder what kind of despair lies behind such a collective decision. We need 2.3 babies per 1000 women per year and most of the Western world is currently between 1.3 and 1.7. But the root causes of a decision to commit demographic suicide are very important. The hedonism, materialism and individualism of Western culture, which the West has exported around the world, are pathological symptoms of a deeper spiritual malaise. People who are schooled to think primarily of their rights and entitlements are simply unable to commit to self-sacrifice and the common good. Abortion feeds the culture of entitlement and selfishness and the end result of the Culture of Death is the decision to die as a culture.

There are other reasons, but these are twelve of the most compelling ones to make the eradication of abortion from civilized societies the highest priority for the 21st century.

The Euthanasia Blues

Here is a protest song from the disabled person's rights movement:

Discrimination Against Handicapped People in the UK

The following story in The Mail On-line details widespread neglect of handicapped people in London hospitals. Now that eugenic abortion has been widely accepted in Western society, with arount 90% of babies diagnosed as probably having Down's Syndrome being killed by their parents and doctors by abortion, the logic of the lives of handicapped people not being worth protecting is being extended to handicapped children and adults. From the story:

"A vulnerable patient starved to death in an NHS hospital after 26 days without proper nourishment. Martin Ryan, 43, had suffered a stroke which left him unable to swallow.
But a 'total breakdown in communication' meant he was never fitted with a feeding tube. It was one of a number of horrific cases where the NHS fatally failed patients."

For the whole story, see: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1110054/Starved-death-NHS-hospital-Damning-inquiry-highlights-case-patient-left-food-26-days.html

The handicapped persons advocacy group, Mencap, has issued a damning report called "Death By Indifference," which details six cases of patients who died by neglect. All were handicapped. To see the report click here:
http://www.mencap.org.uk/case.asp?id=52&menuId=53&pageno=

Ann Abraham, the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman, has now begun to investigate the cases outlined in the report and The Mail On-line reports that sources close to the Ombudsman say that she will issue a "withering verdict" of a "devestating" overall picture of neglect.

Why are handicapped people being neglected? How does a 30 year old die of a broken leg in one of the richest countries of the world - one that has socialized medical care? What is behind this callous treatment of the weakest among us? If this is happening in London, what is the likliehood that this is the only place it is occurring?

Here is just a summary of one heart-rending story from the Mencap Report

"Emma was just 26 when she died. She had a severe learning disability, which meant she sometimes had difficulty communicating how she felt.

Emma was admitted to hospital for tests – she was upset and in pain. The hospital found her behaviour difficult to manage and sent her home without any help to control her pain. When Emma and her mum went back to the hospital for the results they were told Emma had cancer.

There was a 50:50 chance that she would survive if she was treated, but the doctors decided not to treat her. They said she couldn't consent to treatment. Again Emma was sent home with no way to help with her pain.

A week later Emma wasn't eating or drinking, so her mum took her back to the hospital and tried to make the doctors treat her daughter.

Still having to watch her daughter suffer from the cancer, Emma's mum went to the High court to force the doctors to treat her daughter, but by the time the order came through, the cancer had progressed too far.

Emma was admitted to a palliative care hospice where she died a month later."

I'm not sure who to feel sorry for the most: the mentally-impaired person who is being killed by neglect or the spiritually-impaired persons doing the killing. According to my theology, the former lose their physical lives, but will live forever with Jesus, but the latter lose their souls and will live forever cut off off from God in hell. I suppose the answer is that we should be most worried about what the culture of death is doing to all of us.