Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Do not underestimate the power of the culture of death

"We’ve learned that what was unimaginable one day can become reality the next. Today, pressures for euthanasia are building; developments in biomedicine are occurring with such speed that they have outpaced reflection on their moral implications; experiments on human embryos are fostering a mentality that treats the lives of the weak as means to the ends of the strong; and the freedoms of religion and conscience are coming under increasing threat.

Thirty years ago, who could have imagined such a thing as partial-birth abortion! When I ask myself why so many people have been slow to realize how easily today’s atrocity can become tomorrow’s routine, one answer I come up with is that it was due in part to a failure to realize something very important about choice, namely that choices last.

Each time we make policy on abortion, euthanasia, or embryonic experimentation, we are changing the moral ecology of our country. We are either helping to build the culture of life or cooperating with the culture of death. It hasn’t helped that the elite media, the powerful foundations, the sex industry, and the vast profit-making abortion industry have done their best to disguise the truth of what was happening."
Mary Ann Glendon

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I would love to hear how religious freedoms are coming under threat in America, because I don't believe it.

A "partial birth abortion" is not a medical term, it is called "intact dilation and extraction". For you to oppose this medical procedure is disgusting, because it's obvious you know nothing about the women who need it.

IDX is only used in .17% of abortions in the US, by women who WANTED their pregnancies! Most of the time they find out late that the fetus or fetuses have horrible deformities or illnesses that will kill them or cause them a short life of horrible suffering - the parents want to save their potential child from that terrible fate!

One woman and her husband found out in her 8th month that her twins were conjoined - the ultrasound did not catch it before then - they thought the twins just 'cuddled' a lot. It turned out they were very weak, at best one would survive, and then live a life filled with painful surgeries and organ transplants - no guarantees either - they could both die as soon as they had the c-section. They were heartbroken - they decided to have terminate the pregnancies to spare them the pain and death that was imminent.

A quote from her husband: "We made an informed decision to go to Kansas. One can only imagine the pain borne by a woman who happily carries a child for 8 months only to find out near the end of term that the children were not to be and that she had to make the decision to terminate the pregnancy and go against everything she had been taught to believe was right. This was what my wife had to do."

An IDX procedure removes the fetus whole - this allows the parents to grieve their lost potential babies! They routinely purchase coffins, clothing, and toys to bury their babies with after an IDX - something you carelessly call a "partial birth abortion". The women who choose this wanted their children born - they simply spared them the suffering.

Some other reasons: Trisomy 13 & 18 (90% of babies die before age 1 who have this disorder), Potter's Syndrome (an absence or malformation of kidneys- vast majority of babies die at birth or shortly afterwards), Lethal Dwarfism (brain tissue is absent entirely or malformed), organs being formed outside the body (such as the brain and heart), ect. Carrying many of these high-risk babies also risks the mothers' health and life, as they can cause stroke, paralysis, future fertility and death.

These women wanted their babies - an intact extraction of the fetus allows them to grieve their baby. It is also safer for the mother. The 'partial-birth abortion' ban does nothing to stop late-term abortions like those; the doctor is simply forced to dismember the fetus inside the mothers' body before he extracts it. There is no hope to hug and cuddle the baby you wanted after that.