I think the one thing a lot of people may not realize, is that the infant who lives only a short time, is one of the few rare people that experiences love the entire time they are alive.
To rob the little one of that? To rob the people able to say they were able to love them every moment they were here?
I had a friend whose unborn baby was diagnosed with microcephaly (when the brain does not develop). She was advised to terminate, but instead gave birth to her baby and lovingly held her until she died. What a contrast to people who violently terminate their babies’ life.
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He condemns the conspiracy against life that seeks to eliminate malformed babies and others with disabilities. He reaffirms Catholic teaching that the direct and voluntary killing of an innocent human being is always gravely immoral, singling out the prevention of the birth of children affected by various types of anomalies.
Such an attitude, he writes, is shameful and utterly reprehensible, since it presumes to measure the value of human life only within the parameters of normality and physical well-being, thus opening the way to legitimizing infanticide and euthanasia as well.
This would be a good article to show to those leftists (especially the academic types) who will scream bloody murder if a disabled person is even potentially discriminated against, but who simultaneously insist that abortion is a Gaia-given right to all women.
**Angela, Mayer-Whittingtons daughter, lived for only a few minutes after birth. But in that time, Angela met her parents, was baptized, and received last rites. Mayer-Whittington described those moments as the most wonderful and heartbreaking of my life.
Seeing Angela alive, holding her, telling her I loved her, had made everything worthwhile, all the grief, uncertainty, and confusion, she wrote. The decision to proceed with the pregnancy had been the correct one. I now had the face of my infant daughter forever etched in my memory. **
Something similar happened with one of the religion education directors here in town.
God bless all these parents during these difficult moments.
“But a high-risk obstetrician urged Maria to abort and tried to console her by telling her that if she got pregnant again she would be able to obtain prenatal genetic screening early in the pregnancy. This, Maria was told, would allow for the early detection of any fetal abnormalities and time to abort before she got emotionally attached to her child.”
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If a doctor told me this, I might have to rip his face off. . .
What better gift than to have a child Baptised before death.
I never considered the question whether a child can be baptised before birth?
From newadvent.org
The fate of infants who die without baptism must be briefly considered here. The Catholic teaching is uncompromising on this point, that all who depart this life without baptism, be it of water, or blood, or desire, are perpetually excluded from the vision of God. This teaching is grounded, as we have seen, on Scripture and tradition, and the decrees of the Church. Moreover, that those who die in original sin, without ever having contracted any actual sin, are deprived of the happiness of heaven is stated explicitly in the Confession of Faith of the Eastern Emperor Michael Palæologus, which had been proposed to him by Pope Clement IV in 1267, and which he accepted in the presence of Gregory X at the Second Council of Lyons in 1274. The same doctrine is found also in the Decree of Union of the Greeks, in the Bull “Lætentur Caeli” of Pope Eugene IV, in the Profession of Faith prescribed for the Greeks by Pope Gregory XIII, and in that authorized for the Orientals by Urban VIII and Benedict XIV. Many Catholic theologians have declared that infants dying without baptism are excluded from the beatific vision; but as to the exact state of these souls in the next world they are not agreed.
http://www.benotafraid.net/ = Be Not Afraid.net
Connection refused: www.benotafraid.net:80
Is the site still there? I can access the BNA blog: http://benotafraid.wordpress.com/
A blog full of prenatal diagnosis info, stories, news, miracles, and of course, hope