Posted on 03/19/2012 3:48:57 PM PDT by wagglebee
Reading through the Slate article: Rick Santorum, Meet My Son, I find myself torn. As another mom in the trenches, I can genuinely feel her love for her son, and the agony of watching him suffer. She is in the battle, and in the battle, sometimes all we can feel is the battle. Also, though, I wish we could sit down for coffee and talk about who her baby is, inside.
With my disabled child, I have to be mindful of two realities. One, that his brain is terribly broken; his life is often a battle between life and death, and he is partially blind, nonverbal and prone to life-threatening seizures. The other reality is that he has a spirit, and he is whole and alive on the inside. Over the years, all of us in his extended family have had glimpses into his “secret life,” the place where his thoughts and his words are. Inside a broken body is a complete soul. He feels, he loves, he dreams.
I cannot deny who he is on the inside, even if that reality is almost entirely veiled from me. He’s created in the image of God and his life has value, even if that life is painfully brief.
I think most mothers of chronically ill children have moments when they think their child would not want to keep fighting for life, given the chance. But then the crisis passes, to some degree, and you and I see the small joys that make their days beautiful, and we realize that he is happy to be alive, to be loved, to have another day with the people who love him the most.
Some day, I’m sure we’ll have the technology to understand to some degree what goes on in the mind of the disabled. It’s my assertion that we will find very little differences in their thoughts and feelings and those that we with relatively normal minds have. I say that, among other reasons, because I have never gotten up close to a severely disabled child without seeing that inner self, that beautiful spirit.
Twelve and half years into this battle, I have an understanding that my child holds a special place in the heart of God, and I don’t take that lightly. I am accountable to God for how I tend this little broken one, here on earth. His life and his death are not my choice, his quality of life is not mine to estimate.
I’m not opposed to honest prenatal testing, where you are given scientific results and allowed to prepare yourself emotionally and medically for a baby with disabilities. I am very opposed to the junk science that much prenatal testing is currently, with overblown false disability diagnoses and the wholesale push for abortion of the even potentially imperfect. Shades of Hitler, anyone? Let me challenge you: the next time you see a disabled person, look them in the eyes. Look past the drool and the damaged frame and look them in the eyes. Say hello, because there’s somebody beautiful in there.
LifeNews Note: Jess Clark divides her time between writing, breaking up fights over Buzz Lightyear, and traveling with a missionary rock and roll band. She and her husband Richy have 3 biological children and recently adopted their 4th. reprinted with permission from Bound4Life’s blog.
Amen!
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It must take tremendous courage, tremendous humility, tremendous virtue; on the other hand, isn't a mother's job to deliver the baby she is carrying?
Tremendous courage is the minimum. Ergo...
The Slate article is absolutely fascinating because while it was written by somebody who ostensibly has command of the English language, it is absolutely fraught with contradictions.
It could be stated - not trivially, by the way - that she is merely whining that her son’s disability is too hard on her and she wishes she had killed him when she had the chance.
There is an obvious solution to this problem. If you don’t want a child with Tay-Sachs, you and your partner can be tested. If you’re both carriers, don’t risk it. Of course, that isn’t what she is arguing.
A good friend of mine fits into the category of one who should have been aborted, or subject to legal infanticide, based on this kind of Satanic logic.
She now has a PhD in microbiology, and is on the research faculty at McGill University. Her peer review articles set the groundwork for “smart bomb” type anti-cancer treatments.
“Amen” is right. :)
From Emily Rapp:
“Do I wish my child wouldn’t suffer, that it would have been better for him to have never been born than to watch him struggle to breathe? To know that he will never speak, walk, chew solid food, toddle, or move? Yes. One statement doesn’t cancel out the other.”
The difference between the two women is an infinite or eternal gap. You see, there is a soul in that little body and his totally pure, being of heart, soul, body, and mind is who God, his creator, sees and who we will meet someday.
Ronan’s body and disease are representative of the sin that we all have within ourselves. Do not misread this - I did not say he had sin, I said his disease represents our sin. We are blind, paralyzed and will die an eternal death if we do not cry out for God to save us.
Does Ronan need to cry out? For me, he is in God’s hands and God’s ways are higher than mine. A LOT higher. I just hope that someday his mom will come to have faith that we do have souls and that Jesus loves the little children.
“His quality of life is not mine to estimate”
Nor is it Zeke Emmanuel’s.
These people who want babies with disabilities to be aborted need to meet my grandson, and adopted grand-daughter (from the Ukraine.)
God bless my son and daughter in law!
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