"Doomed" Children?

By Seth -
An article posted today on Care2.com details the painful story of one mother who bore her baby knowing "her child would likely never be able to breathe on its own, would have severely deformed anatomy, and was unlikely even to survive birth at all."

The conclusion of the article? It is a far greater crime for a mother to give birth to a "doomed child" than to abort the fetus in utero.

Oddly, the author declares quite definitively that the fetus cannot feel pain until after birth, yet states that an abortion could have ended the fetus's suffering. Hmm...

The deeper matter, though, is: what do we do with people who are suffering?

Would anyone deny that to give birth to a baby only to watch the child struggle for a few hours before dying must be pain of inestimable measure? Surely not. However, does a mother's agony justify her in taking the life of her child?

Women who give birth to preemies fighting for their lives may experience great trauma as they watch their children struggle. Would a mother therefore be justified in killing her born preemie to end the child's suffering and strop her own trauma?

No. Why? Because the preemie is human.

If the fetus, too, is human, then to kill her because she is suffering is tantamount to killing a suffering newborn.

While we ought to strive to eliminate suffering, we should not eliminate sufferers.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Meet a Baby Saved

By Seth -
Image
In the middle of high school, I began to spend Thursdays throughout summer on Webster Street in Fort Wayne, IN. Good friend and stalwart defender of life Pam Durdahl called Thursday “the best and worst day of the week.” It was the best because you were with like-minded people—indeed, this is where I met Aubrie! But, what brought us all together is why it was the worst: This was the day each week when Ulrich Klopfer would come to town to kill babies. Details continue to be released in the horrific discovery this month that Klopfer stored babies’ bodies in the garage at his Illinois residence. But one note which grabbed my attention is that these babies died in the years of 2000-2002, the latter half of my high school days. All of these babies came from Indiana. And now we know some of them died in Fort Wayne, meaning while I was on that sidewalk, Klopfer was killing babies and taking them home. It seems it was not enough for him to violate the victims once. I didn’t know the...
Read more

Deeper than Shared Conviction

By Seth -
Image
If you were to stumble into the Created Equal training center this summer, you would find an interesting sight: an Ivy League graduate seated next to a high school senior, a vegan student enjoying a salad next to another savoring a hamburger, and hands shooting into the air or sudden applause as all passionately defend their position on a range of philosophical matters. This eclectic scene is Created Equal’s internship. At the beginning of the summer, our latest band of interns arrived with the usual awkwardness felt at the beginning of a school term. But what has united them over the past couple of months is far greater than the happenstance of selecting the same college course. Indeed it is deeper than shared conviction. Over the past two months, they’ve celebrated victories both intimate and public—from hearing a mother outside Planned Parenthood say she has changed her mind to watching the Ohio Senate pass the Dismemberment Abortion Ban. They’ve grappled in our classroom...
Read more

Out of Focus?

By Seth -
The Columbus Dispatch today ran a story about the Personhood initiative's arrival in the land of the Buckeyes. The article also referenced other recent Ohio efforts against abortion, such as the Heartbeat Bill . What leaped off of my screen, though, was the first comment following the piece: It's unfortunate with 9% unemployment, children and adults starving in the street, people losing their homes, crime rates increasing, and corporations buying our politicians, these people are fighting to make abortion illegal. We have freedom of religion in this country, but they want to impose their religious ideology on us, in this secular nation. People can't find jobs, and children go without food. The most important thing on their mind is making abortion illegal. Jesus would be appalled at these people. Don't believe me? Read the Holy Bible. Jesus never spoke about abortion. But he did speak a lot about helping the poor and the homeless. - Toni Goodman Here's an experim...
Read more