Say No to Infanticide Before It is Too Late
I have a column in the NRO today, warning that infanticide promotion is no longer limited to the Peter Singers of the world but is becoming an Establishment project. And that is very bad news for profoundly disabled and catastrophically ill babies.
Here is the heart of the piece: Arguments about infanticide as necessary to alleviate suffering, I opine, "are really a veneer for the real issues, which are money and commitment. Disabled infants are expensive to care for, particularly if they don't die young, and they require all sorts of attention. The nub of the issue isn't about our supposed inability to alleviate the suffering of infants--a false supposition--but rather, about our not wanting to spend the financial and emotional resources it would take to do so."
Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, editor-in-chief of First Things, once said famously and accurately, "Thousands of ethicists and bioethicists, as they are called, professionally guide the unthinkable on its passage through the debatable on its way to becoming the justifiable until it is finally established as the unexceptional." We see that process unfolding right in front of our very noses in the infanticide controversy.
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 9:18 AM
5 Comments
5 Comments:
This from a reader: "I agree whole heartedly. I believe Hitler referred to the 'life not worth living' as useless eaters."
WJS: Actually, that concept began with the book Life Unworthy of Life, written in 1920 by a German doctor and lawyer.
Here's a question. Why do we tolerate abortion on demand.And what about partial-birth? Okay, I'm not a lawyer. I suppose it's okay in some states but not in others. You're right we haven't ventured so far down the slippery slope to infanicide yet--though it seems to me there sure isn't much difference from partial birth. I recently read that whether this is legal or not depends only on whether the head is removed, which is unbeleivable to me. Since a controversy over stem cells exists, why is partial birth--or any abortion for convenience--even considered?
godsend:
Traditional morality - not just Christian, but Hindu, Jewish, Islamic, most Native American religions, etc. - suggests that a man and a woman should be married before having sex and children.
Modern studies suggests that children raised in households with both parents and the marriage intact do considerably better in life persuits than children in single family homes where either there was a divorce or the parents were never married (homes where one parent was widowed or where a single person adopted a child don't have the same problems that the aforementioned single homes did).
However, at one point the notion of the united family was seen as oppressive toward females, since it was assumed that a woman in a marriage would be forced into a submissive position by her husband and would not have the freedom to be herself. Moving away from the traditional views of marriage meant that women wanted to free themselves from responsibility while they were busy "finding themselves." Marriage became something that got put on the back burner (though these days the future of marriage looks bleak).
That meant that more women didn't want the "burden" of having children. They viewed pregnancy as a chain to tie them down. On-demand abortion became a useful tool for them because they wouldn't have to bear the burden of a child on their own should the father prove unwilling to assist.
We live in a fast foot nation. Everybody must have what they want the moment they want it, and something that's "inconvinent" must be eliminated right away. Egocentricity going amuck. And people feel that "it's not our business," they say because they don't feel that they should interfere with the "rights" of others, but really either they don't want to get involved because they don't want to feel like a bad guy, or because they are lukewarm concerning other people, or they did something similar at some time in their past and don't want to seem hypocritical.
We're a nation that never grew up. That's our problem. The nation taken as a whole is like a spoild child. Most people don't start growing up until they're faced with some sort of personal crisis that makes them confront their failings and realize that if they don't act, then *nothing* can be done to change the consequences. For most of the folk I know, the first time they realized they were going to die does it for them. For others, it's dealing with the loss or illness of a loved one. And for some, it's seeing a crisis and knowing that you have to respond.
Our parents tried too hard to shield us from discomfort. Remember, the American Dream is that with enough hard work you can have the world on a silver platter, so that *the next generation* doesn't have to work to get where you are.
Food for thought, ne?
This from a reader about the NRO piece: "Hi Wesley,
Back at the time of the Terri Schiavo affair, the Conservative and Christian Right insisted that it was Life itself that mattered, not the quality of life, and that Terri Schiavo was alive, and the quality of her life was simply not a factor that should be considered in the debate about whether to keep her alive. I believe that to be your stance concerning the issue of infanticide.
The British and the Dutch are debating the ethics of terminating Life - involuntary euthanasia. This, in your National Review article today, you oppose.
(1) If it is Life that is important, rather than the Quality of that Life, then Republicans can rest easy with the notion of a dozen million American children growing up in poverty. The richest country on the planet keeps a dozen million kids in poverty and you don't care, because the quality of their lives doesn't count. "Stop snivelling, kid. You're alive!" snorts the Christian Right, while Republicans hand tax relief to their billionaire buddies. Moral? The National Review should hang its head in shame, but the magazine you contribute to has trumpeted this immorality for the last six years.
(2) Involuntary Euthanasia already exists in America. 45 million Americans do not have health insurance, and if some poor sap needs treatment but cannot afford it, well, he dies. America spends more money than any other country on its health system, but has an abysmal mortality rate, because if you can't afford health care, you die, whether you want to or not. The Brits and the Dutch at least give you a fighting chance in their national health care systems. The American Culture of Death just turns its back on you and lets you die. Baby killing does NOT begin with either the British or Dutch debate. Baby killing is a rollicking Republican American tradition, with an infant mortality rate that's positively 3rd World.
So what are you getting on your high moral horse about?"
First, thanks for writing. Second, this isn't a partisan issue. Some of the most powerful opponents of infanticide in specific, and assisted suicide/euthanasia in general, are disability right activists who are very liberal, very secular, and very pro choice. Third, without debating your comments, other than to add that if a person doesn't have health insurance it does not mean that he or she dies since we all have the right to emergency room care (and I have called for expanding health care coverage), why would it ever be right to add to the level of immoral policies? I am on my high horse because it is immoral and wrong to kill babies. Period. It is oppression. It is exploitation. It creates the concept of the life not worthy of life into policy and people's consciousnesses. If you can't see that, then I suppose we owe the doctors hanged after World War II for having killed babies an apology.
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