Two recent stories show the absurdity surrounding the defense of abortion, for those who are entirely honest admit that killing in the womb is no different than killing outside the womb. Denial of personhood is subjective and utilitarian, and powerful in the hands who have no fundamental respect for the sanctity of life.
In Britain’s “Journal of Medical Ethics,” two writers defend infanticide, arguing that “newborns do not have the same moral status as actual persons … [because] individuals who are not in the condition of attributing any value to their own existence are not persons.” The authors elaborate further, noting that if babies cannot explain themselves, then they’ll hardly understand their own loss of life.
Britain, of course, is enduring a health care crisis with soaring costs and limited revenues -- so killing the defective babies is merely an exercise in fiscal prudence. A newborn is only days apart from a nine-month old fetus, so these "ethicists" are right in saying that birth is an arbitrary line in making such a choice. They are not the first to seriously propose killing infants on the basis of their health, and other countries have already embraced "physician assisted suicide" with and without the consent of the victim. The voices are simply given more volume in more "prestigious" platforms.
And then there is this heartbreaking account of a "reduction" (abstract term which means killing the extra babies in utero so that only one survives). To his credit, the father tries hard to defend them and then will not turn away when the mother insists that the procedure goes on.
[L]et nobody fool you. It is not painless for the child, and anyone who says otherwise is a liar. Abortion is not an excision of a featureless bunch of cells; it is infanticide. We have revived the practice of child sacrifice to the new deities of casual sex and convenience. We rationalize the reality of murder by altering our perspective of the nascent life through euphemisms like "fetus" or descriptions of "a clump of cells"...just like the Nazis convinced themselves that the people screaming as they were shot or gassed were "Untermenchen," subhuman, and therefore guiltlessly exterminated.
This is how every perpetrator of genocide has always rationalized his or her actions. By doing likewise, we condemn our own souls
He prays that his remaining child survives. I pray that their marriage survives -- for most unions cannot endure when death comes between them. The grace is there, but every step of the journey will be bittersweet, as the father already knows.
He has the courage to call abortion what it is, although it indicts him personally, and particulary as a Jew whose own people have been targeted in the same chilling manner over the centuries. He is contrite and knows he needs God's forgiveness -- what about the rest of us? How dare we make moral judgements on other cultures and eras, when our own is built on materialistic indifference to legalised murder? As Fr Longanecker points out, our transformation into darkness isn't going to come at the point of a sword, but a pen, with laws that turn our sterile halls of medicine into well-scrubbed citadels of death, where the cries of patients are dulled with mortal elixers, and those outside relieved of anxious burdens.
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