Nine of every ten fetuses diagnosed with Down’s syndrome are murdered in his or her mother’s womb. Some might wonder aloud if the test given has been proven to be 100% accurate because of the very small margin for error. That is not what I wonder because those children deserve to live regardless of their genetic makeup.
We are living in a society of decreasing tolerance and of decreasing empathy. What we desire are not so much children as perfect children. We certainly could not be burdened with the care of a child over his or her lifetime! We are too shallow for that calling; give me children that can provide some utility.
Total care requires someone with the propensity to be totally loving and devoted and we are just not those people. We deny the potential that we might grow as human beings through this blessing of human life God has placed within his or her mother’s womb and we pluck it and throw it away, unless its cells could be useful to somebody who rates care. Nine out of ten times the world loses an opportunity to love deeper and nine out of ten times an actual child loses his or her actual life.
The OB/GYN will provide the prenatal testing and the advice we need to take advantage of services which can take care of this little genetic mishap but we are the ones who will have to meet them after our own life ends. We will have to explain to them why their lives do not matter and God will also be listening from His judgment seat to see if our explanation may also damn our soul too; to see if we can escape our own judgment. I do hope you are comforted in the assurance that whatever our pithy explanation of why the individual soul in front of you could not live, it will be that soul that will intercede for us, that heroic soul will beg God for mercy on our souls. So perhaps if the irony strikes us hard enough in the face we will ourselves be saved from the sort of disposable love we lobbied for during our lives.
Some would propose that souls such as these are an evolutionary burden, but this eugenics argument misses the fact that we must not only evolve our bodies and our genetics we must evolve our sense of compassion and empathy. In order to build a strong species we must have strong interconnections in our society. The eugenics trend which seems to seek to build a stronger species fails because it undercuts the empathetic tendencies which bring humans together on a meaningful level.
No one has ever cured a disease by simply killing everybody who contracts it and Down’s syndrome is no different. Simply killing every child which pops up with Down’s is a solution only individuals with the ethos of Hitler could approve of. The “final solution” for genetic disease cannot be murder.
So as we go through our day if we should happen upon a parent of a Down’s child be especially kind for they are actually preparing for their eternal reward and we may need their good word one day.
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