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This article was originally published in Aleteia — Catholic Spirituality, Lifestyle, World News, and Culture. Click here to read the Original Article
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A leading health authority in Argentina accidentally made a strong statement about the atrocity of abortion this week while defending a bill that would legalize the killing of unborn babies across the South American country.
Church Militant reports Dr. Ginés González García, the minister of health for Argentina, said abortions would be the “greatest universal genocide” in the world if there were two lives involved – something he denied.
“Here there are not two lives as [pro-lifers] say,” he told lawmakers Tuesday. “Here it is clearly just one life and the other is a phenomenon … it is one person and the other is a phenomenon … I repeat, that it seems to me that [the language] is not used properly … if it were not, we would be witnessing the greatest universal genocide.”
In the early 20th century, eugenics was widely supported among the educated classes all across the West. Eugenicists fancied themselves benefactors of the human race, putting to use the most cutting-edge science to eradicate human suffering, and to “improve” the human race.
By giving nature a helping hand, carefully encouraging the reproduction of the “fittest” members of the human race, and discouraging the reproduction of the “unfit,” eugenicists believed they could rapidly create a race of strong, healthy, and super-intelligent human beings. No longer would the state and society be burdened with “moral degenerates” (the memorable term used by eugenicist Margaret Sanger), the mentally disabled, and those prone to costly and painful diseases.
On Friday, the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals handed down a ruling allowing a portion of Tennessee’s 2020 pro-life legislation, signed into law by Governor Bill Lee, to take effect. The Court ruled on parts of the legislation that are collectively referred to as the “reason bans” because they prohibit abortions for certain reasons. Those reasons include aborting due to a prenatal diagnosis of Down Syndrome, or because the preborn child is not the gender or race that the mother or both parents wanted. The abortion providers’ lawsuit requested an injunction preventing the enforcement of the reason bans while the case was being litigated.
When UC Berkeley bioethics professor Osagie K. Obasogie received a staff email in 2018 notifying him about the availability of research funds from the “Genealogical Eugenic Institute Fund,” he was reportedly shocked. The Fund was offering the University hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for “research and support” relating to “family planning, infertility, assisted reproduction technologies, prenatal screening, abortion, gene editing and gene modification” and came from a family trust to the University of California Board of Regents in 1975. Eventually, it was allocated to the Berkeley campus’ School of Public Health. According to Professor Obasogie, the $2.4 million fund’s stated purpose was “the improvement of the human race through research and education in that field generally known as eugenics.”
A recent article published in The Atlantic is drawing attention to the issue of eugenic, discriminatory abortions. Focusing largely on Denmark, staff writer Sarah Zhang discusses prenatal testing and the abortions that largely follow a positive result. What happens when a society decides that people with disabilities don’t deserve to live? Zhang’s article thoughtfully discusses the implications of eugenic abortions, but ultimately falls short of outright condemning it. And it’s a shame, because that is what needs to happen.
As Zhang points out, Denmark should be one of the best places to have a child with a disability.
Good news in the fight against the culture of death is all too rare. But today, we have extremely good news from the homeland of the “pope of life,” St. John Paul II. Just days ago, Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal removed one of the few remaining exceptions to that country’s abortion law, ruling that abortions in cases of “fetal defect or incurable illness” constitute a violation of Poland’s Constitution.
The tribunal’s president, Julia Przylebska, wrote in the decision that abortion in such cases amounts to “eugenic practices.” Since the Polish Constitution guarantees the right to life, she wrote, such abortions are “a directly forbidden form of discrimination.”
Frequently, people with disabilities like Down syndrome are used as a reason to keep abortion legal throughout pregnancy. But those people are living, breathing human beings who can hear politicians, doctors, and abortion proponents discussing their condition as unworthy of life. And in some cases, people with disabilities are dehumanized entirely, as was recently the case when abortionist Dr. Malcolm Potts spoke of aborting human beings with Down syndrome.
In an online debate with pro-life apologist Stephanie Gray Connors, Potts argued that since “many embryos are abnormal” and there are “natural, necessary processes” of “destroying those embryos in very large numbers” (meaning miscarriage), aborting any that do survive “is to enhance what nature does.”
Motherhood is never easy — don’t let anyone tell you otherwise! It looks a little different for every woman, but for more of us than not, our journey to and through motherhood can be a challenge. Mine certainly has been, a road so full of twists and turns that it looks more like a corkscrew than a straight path. Yet as I travel around our country and speak with thousands of mothers about their own stories, so often I find just how much we have in common.
I share with them that I have had four viable pregnancies. I know the pain and devastation of miscarriage as well, the fear of being far from home and rushing to an emergency room. But for those four viable pregnancies, abortion was pushed on me for each one. I gave in and did abort my first, but I fought for the lives of the other three, and all of them are thriving today.
Mothers have spoken out about the immense pressure they faced to have abortions in a series of interviews with the BBC. The stories bring even more attention to the United Kingdom’s controversial abortion laws, which permit abortion at any time in pregnancy if the child is diagnosed with a disability.
“We were offered 15 terminations”
Emma Mellor and her husband Steve already had a child when they got pregnant for the second time, when Mellor was 24 years old. At 20 weeks pregnant, doctors discovered fluid on her daughter’s brain, and from then on, the pressure to have an abortion was constant.
In 2016, Tara Vigarino’s water broke at just 17 weeks. Terrified, Vigarino was told that her baby had no chance of survival due to such an early gestational age. “I was a basket of emotions,” Vigarino told SELF magazine. “It was not at all what I was expecting to hear.”
Doctors at Vigarino’s hospital encouraged her to either have an abortion or to go home and wait for a miscarriage to happen. However, her OB/GYN offered her help and hope and told her to stay in bed and drink fluids to try to increase what amniotic fluid she did have.
Once a week she would visit her OB/GYN to check on the baby.
When Emma Mellor learned that her unborn daughter, Jaimie, might have Down syndrome, she refused to consider an abortion.
But her doctors did not take “no” for an answer. They kept asking and asking.
And asking.
In an interview with the BBC, the British mother said she was pressured to abort Jaimie 15 times – including right up to birth — just because she had a disability.
“I was told that until my baby had started traveling down the birth canal, I could still terminate,” she told the news outlet.
Now, Mellor and other families are urging society to protect children, born and unborn, who have Down syndrome and provide better information and support to their families.
During her 20-week ultrasound, Samantha Sommerville learned that her preborn baby girl had spina bifida, and doctors offered little optimism for the baby’s future. Until 24 weeks, Sommerville said she was told to abort at every single appointment. But she stood firm in her decision to let her daughter live.
Doctors said the baby had myelomeningocele, the most severe form of spina bifida, and that she would be paralyzed from the waist down. They also believed she might have developmental delays due to hydrocephalus. At 23 weeks, Sommerville underwent testing to determine if her daughter had any other medical concerns that would prevent her from undergoing prenatal surgery to close her back.
Discrimination against unborn babies with disabilities is a huge problem in our supposedly modern, progressive culture.
Countless times, LifeNews.com and other pro-life sources have encountered stories of mothers being pressured to abort unborn babies after a diagnosis of Down syndrome, spina bifida, microcephaly or even cleft lip.
A new study highlighted in Scientific American found more evidence of this discrimination while conducting research about medical diagnosis trauma.
Authors Cindi May, a professor of psychology at the College of Charleston, and Jaclyn Hennessey Ford, a research assistant professor in the department of psychology and neuroscience at Boston College, surveyed more than 300 mothers of children diagnosed with Down syndrome.
A series of disturbing posts on Reddit detail a mother’s decision to have a eugenic abortion, and the effect it had on her preteen daughter. Writing on the “Parenting” and “Abortion” subreddits, the woman laid out her plan to have a late-term abortion after discovering her child had Down syndrome.
In her first post, the woman explained she had four children, and was pregnant with her fifth. Because of “complications,” she decided to have an abortion. The post was deleted, but was able to be accessed through Removeddit.
She then followed up, explaining that the “complications” she mentioned actually constituted a diagnosis of Down syndrome.
