The Wrong Conclusion

Life is sacred.

That we create it so cavalierly and, at times "accidentally" with the wrong person for the wrong reasons is a testament to how little we understand about the gift of creation and how beautiful it is.

Instead of being a miracle, oftentimes a baby is little more than an unfortunate side-effect of pleasure-seeking.  It's an "oops", a piece of tissue.  It's something to be feared and despised rather than something to be loved and nurtured.  And it can be eliminated.

So some do, because they don't understand the power they have taken into their hands.  They don't understand that a life at any stage is sacred.  They don't understand that a beating heart at eight weeks gestation is no less worthy of life than a heart which beats vigorously after being brought into the world.

They shun the responsibility that a beating heart would demand.  They silence it.  And they tell themselves it is little more than a choice, that it is somehow better, that no good would have come from allowing an unwanted heart to beat on.

So it's little wonder that, in a world where unborn babies are regularly swept out of existence by their mothers, someone would come to the conclusion that babies who have been born don't matter much either.  And this is how we get two "ethicists" arguing for post-birth infanticide.

According to these men,  "[Killing a newborn] should be permissible in all cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled."  Why?  A newborn, like a fetus, is only a "potential person," because she is not capable of "attributing to her own existence," and as such does not possess an innate right to life.  Parents should have the option of killing their newborns, these ethicists say, because to raise them might be an "undue burden" on the parents.

Perhaps these men would find friends in Deborah and Ariel Levy, parents who recently sued their healthcare provider when their daughter was born with Down Syndrome.  You see, they would have aborted her if they had known she would suffer from this disability (according to recent studies, around 89% of parents who make the prenatal discovery that their child has Down Syndrome choose to abort).

A jury awarded them $3 million for their misfortune

They say they love their daughter, but it is not love to say that a child with flaws is somehow less worthy of life than one who is whole.  Yes, they will raise her now because they have no other choice, but they feel that someone owes them for this "mistake."  That's not love.  That's selfishness so deep that no light could pierce it.

So you'll have to forgive me for wondering, but if they had had the option to kill her after she was born, would they have done it?

I can't think of anything more tragic than a parent saying to a child, "I wish you had never been born."  And I can't think of anything more sad than two men who have concluded that babies are not worthy of living.  Life at every stage, no matter how imperfect or inconvenient it is, is sacred.

To conclude otherwise is a tragedy.