Posted on 12/13/2003 12:53:14 PM PST by Clive
Let me tell you a secret about abortion. You're not meant to talk about it. Really. Don't say a word.
As a journalist, you can call for hospitals to be closed, the poor to be ignored, minorities to be exploited and you'll still be acceptable in polite and correct society. But say that life begins at conception and the doors close on you like you were a criminal in a prison.
I used to write about the issue too often, I think. Now I hold my fire, make sure my guns are loaded to the full. And, oh, how full they are now, as I tell the story of a brave, beautiful woman and the child for whom she fights.
The woman is Joanna Jepson, a curate in the Church of England. She is 27 years old, attractive, modern and wise. She was also born with a facial defect that required corrective surgery. It was that fact, among others, that made her so very angry in this particular case of an unborn child in the sixth month of development being aborted in Britain.
The reason? It had a cleft palate. The parents decided they really couldn't cope with the now very common and relatively minor surgery to repair the palate of their child and instead asked doctors to get rid of it.
The obliging doctors did. Out it came, cleft palate and all, and into the hospital garbage along with the rotten organs and the bodily waste. Six months. Meaning it was a baby, could have survived outside of the womb, was perfect in every other way.
How a parent, how a mother or a father, could have requested such a thing is, frankly, beyond me.
Sense of solidarity
Beyond Jepson, too. She felt not only a moral stab on hearing of this but a sense of solidarity with another powerless human being who happened to have a cosmetic deformity. Because Joanna's parents, if callous, could have decided to have had a hit job done on her as well while she was still safe in her mother's womb.
The law in Britain is vague on abortion but usually prevents the procedure from taking place after 24 weeks. Anything later than that is very rare, and would have to involve ultimate danger to the life of the mother. Not a cleft palate to the child.
So Joanna went to the police and the lower courts, who told her to get lost. After all, there were parking tickets to hand out and other serious offences like that. But this young woman, a feminist who has battled for recognition in church and society, refused to listen. She fought on, and finally the High Court in Britain agreed with her arguments and has ordered the police to investigate.
We don't know what the outcome will be, but already the pro-abortion advocates are screaming mad. Problem is, this time they've rather given themselves away and have alienated entire chunks of the previously supportive or indifferent British population. Because abortion has always been argued from the standpoint of female liberation and autonomy.
Hard to do that when a fully formed, healthy and beautiful child was slaughtered because of a cleft palate. Those who have previously preferred to argue about Beckham than babies are now questioning the basic premises behind abortion.
The abortion took place because this facial problem was classified as a "serious handicap." That is simply a lie. No debate, no argument. A lie. Liar, liar, government grants on fire. Because this involves lots of taxpayers' money and an entire industry. Just like in good old Canada.
Fool and romantic that I am, I'd like to think a child with a cleft palate has a right to live. But then I'm an extremist. I'd like to think children with Downs syndrome have a right to live, and that none of us measures up to some artificial notion of perfection. But then I believe in equality, which is something the abortion lobby seems to have abandoned rather a long time ago.
Not Joanna Jepson, though. She knows the pain and knows the truth. Voices sometimes cry from the grave, and their echoes are heard by living heroes. Thank heavens.
Don't worry they're working on that as we speak.
Leftist death guru Peter Singer at Princeton (teaches ethics)believes that parents should have that right.
In his books, Singer has said that children less than one month old have no human consciousness and do not have the same rights as others.
From his own words: "Killing a defective infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person and sometimes it is not wrong at all."
Maybe it is because women in Spain (which has one of the lowest birthrates in the Western World) tend to have babies later than Americans? I just can't believe that there is a huge number of women in the United States who are having third trimester abortions because of DS- how would they explain not being pregnant anyone? I have not heard of one case personally.
The Mom would do my tagline if it came to her or her child. She didn't and doesn't care that her child is a special needs child. To her, it's her little miracle, and she is thrilled that she was blessed to have him.
I challenge anyone to say otherwise. (I know, I'm preaching to the choir here!)
I don't remember where I got this, but, I've read that 80% of DS babies are getting aborted now. There are tests that can be done fairly early in pregnancy that detect DS.
I was born at 6 months.
Exactly...and liberals are willing to propagate their lies to justify their depravity. They lie to our children with their "planned parenthood" and "sex education", then if all else fails...kill your baby. It amazes me how narcissitic liberals can be.
I was born around 28 weeks with medicine from the 70's.
SUPERMARKET MORALITY
or
"If I don't like it, I can always take it back."
Abortion is not a matter of "reproductive rights" or "women's issues" or "Constitutional safeguards". It is a matter of wills having become so fixated on their own fulfillment that the biological, social, and moral consequences of their own actions are set upon by them as infringements of their right to have the vine of reality grow exclusively up the trellis of their own will. It is a matter of selves under the delusion that they are most fully "human" when they are most fully freed from nature's and society's demand that they be either male or female, enjoy (or at least acknowledge) the difference, and accept the consequences.
Too bizarre to be mistaken for anything else but the condition of a diseased spirit is the dichotomy of thought manifested in the appeal, on the one hand, to the poor, illiterate, unloved, socially-disadvantaged, abused and abusing bastard of incestuous rape who will only be an additional drain on an already overpopulated planet unless he/she/it should first agonizingly die from a genetic defect inherited from parents too selfish and insensitive toward it, toward themselves, and toward the welfare of society to prevent its suffering by means of a "therapeutic" abortion and, on the other hand, to Noble Woman, guardian and embodiment of Constitutional virtue, struggling to protect herself from the advances of a rapacious, patriarchal religion and society, to cast off the biological shackles slapped on her by a cruel and unjust evolution.
It is a rationale designed to justify any choice and to silence any criticism. It is an awfully big gun to pull out for something they allege to be merely a medical decision between a woman and her physician. To remove or not to remove a wart is a decision on that level.
And here is where the slip shows--although they claim (or want to believe) that doing it is nothing, attempting to prevent, to limit, or even to talk first about their doing it is everything.
"Hey! Get the hell off my will! Just who do you think you are to attempt to even think about imposing your morality on me? Besides, can't you see how much I'm suffering?" they say while imposing something far more severe than morality on those who literally depend on them for life.
To put it even more into perspective, imagine this bumper sticker: My fetus was chosen Unviable Tissue Mass of the Month at the Me-First Womyn's Health Center.
Even lab rats get more consideration.
Abortion is a denial. It is a denial of nature, of responsibility, of self-sacrifice, of love, and of life. And what is left? A will whose choices are unobstructed by any of the above.
"Well, that's done," they say, turning to pat and admire the shape of their uncoerced will. "Maybe I'll take this sweater back today, too."
I've heard stories of young ladies having abortions merely to maintain their svelte figures as birdesmaids in upcoming weddings.
Please Mr. Coren. You call that being frank?!
To be frank, it is vile, disgusting, twisted, evil and morally despicable .
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