I remember when I was in grade school and I first learned about the ancient Greek city-states of Athens and Sparta. I remember being appalled at one aspect of Spartan culture: the abandonment of babies with physical or obvious mental defects. They would just leave them to die outside of the city. In fact, the whole class was upset at the Spartan cultural norm.
Times have changes in the 20 years since my elementary school days, and I am sad to say that Western Society has come to the same point. Check out this article I found through Dr. Mohler's site. Don't just read the article, read the comments, too. The writer of the article, Elizabeth R. Schiltz, did something unusual for a pregnant woman to do in the Western world: she did not abort a fetus that had a prenatal diagnosis of Down Syndrome. She is considered a "genetic outlaw." The article was very interesting, but the comments were even more interesting, and saddening.
Many of the readers of the article disagreed with Schiltz's decision, calling her arrogant. They accused her of bringing of "suffering" child in the world for her own needs. One commenter said: "We're not talking about euthanasia, we're talking about preselection," as if the act of abortion doesn't involve the destruction of life, since the fetus is inside of the woman. There are even more overtones of arrogance in some of the comments: Society has a right to decide who gets to be born.
My question is this: Who gets to decide the health/mental/medical criterion for birth? Lawmakers? Doctors? Judges? An amendment to the Constitution voted in by the people? From whence do we determine the criterion? What do we use as an authority to decide who is a person and who is not worthy of life? Advocates for mercy killing/abortion may disguise this immorality in clothes of good intentions. "We won't bring someone in the world who will only suffer in life." However, this deceptive language only hides the true intentions behind this culture of death: In a society driven by convenience, nobody-not even the government-wants the emotional and financial burden and inconvenience of children with special needs. We may not leave the children outside of our cities to be consumed by wild animals or the elements, we just kill them in the womb before it comes to that.
2 comments:
Brent--
Interesting article. About a year ago, I did a pretty intensive study into Pre-Genetic Diagnosis (PGD) and brought up a host of theological/philosophical/legal/etc. issues that would be attendent if this type of "screening" were made available to the general public (which is probably inevitable).
I was fascinated to come across an article by an advocate for Rights of the Disabled who argued that PGD and other similar techiniques are a form of "prejudice" because they begin from a presupposed standard of what constitutes "healthy" and "normal."
At first, I balked at this suggestion, for it should be pretty obvious what is "healthy" and what is not. However, as I reflected upon it, I could see her point about how even the medical industry has created a "hegemony of health" and is incessantly forcing its paradigm upon the world's population, to the utter marginalization of those who fall outside of the spectrum. While I believe this kind of thinking can definintely go overboard (and very quickly, at that), I also think it is a good cautionary note about how imperceptibly we participate in a culture that advances the strong on the heads of the weak. As Christians, obviously this kind of behavior is against that for which we are supposed to stand.
I refuse to believe that someone who holds these opinions is as altruistic as they make themselves out to be. Excuses like these are just veiled attempts at legitimizing the real reason for abortion: convenience. These people don’t really care that the disabled child would have had a hard life; they care that it would have made their life harder. With all the talk about designer babies nowadays, maybe eugenics is right around the corner for us.
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