Globe and Mail Op Ed Propaganda for Renewal of Eugenics

TORONTO, July 13, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – In an op ed intended by the Globe and Mail to be a sympathy piece, a Toronto woman, who identified herself as C. Smyth, told the story of her intention to abort her 19 week old daughter because the child was diagnosed by a geneticist as having a chromosomal disorder. The child, said Smyth, did not meet her and her husband’s standards or fulfill their dreams of having a child athelete.

She says their 19 week-old “miracle” is “tragically flawed:” the child, she is told will have a “significantly lower functioning than other children,” and the decision to abort was difficult. She cried when told the child was a girl.

40 year-old Smyth writes that she and her 45 year-old lawyer husband do not “feel capable of raising a severely disabled child. It would be different if we didn't have a choice, but we do.”

She describes herself and her husband as financially secure yuppies, professional, with university degrees, who own their own mortgage-free house, and who are fit, healthy and looking 10 years younger than their age.

Smyth writes, “Isn't it more cruel to bring a child burdened with so many disadvantages into the world?”

People with Down’s syndrome and other developmental disabilities and their families are becoming increasingly alarmed at the growing popularity of the eugenics philosophy typified by the Globe piece. Disabled rights groups have said that a societal attitude has grown that people with Down’s syndrome or other disabilities are better off dead.

Smyth bluntly admits that before she had undergone the IVF treatment that conceived her child, she and her husband had already ruled out the question of Down’s syndrome. “We had already decided if it was a Down syndrome baby (one in 30 chance for a mother over 40) we wouldn't continue.”

She assumes that everyone agrees that Down’s syndrome is so horrible that even her devoutly Christian mother would agree. “I thought even my church-going mother (who goes door-to-door collecting money for those who are anti-abortion, and their pro-life campaign) could forgive that.”

She describes the actual killing of her daughter equally bluntly. “On the third day, when the cervix has dilated, the doctor clears out the uterus: the evacuation.”

Letters to the editor have appeared in the Globe today decrying the slide towards a new eugenics. Jeremy Jay wrote from Victoria saying that the piece illustrates a shift in the attitudes towards abortion from a debate over the right to life to deciding which children are fit enough to deserve life.

Michael G. Ceci, said “her account gives no consolation to women struggling with the knowledge that their yet unborn child is developmentally disabled.” He pointed out that having this chromosomal disorder is not necessarily a life sentence for the mother, nor should it result in a death sentence for the child.

The piece appeared in the Globe and Mail at the time that the powerful Silent No More Campaign opened in Toronto, where women share their regret at having had an abortion. It also coincides with a Parliamentary effort by Liberal Party MP Paul Steckle to criminalize abortion after 20 weeks gestation.

It is also significant that the Globe produced this anonymous piece at the same time Health Canada is developing regulations under the Assisted Human Reproduction Act to define which genetic disorders are allowed to be screened in IVF embryos. Health Canada is calling for public input on the regulations (see contact information below.)

The Catholic Organization for Life and Family made a presentation to Health Canada pointing out the essential moral flaw of a genetic screening of embryos in IVF labs.

COLF wrote that preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) is always a threat to the dignity of human life. “PGD inherently disrespects the dignity and worth of human life, since it is performed in order to select the most genetically perfect embryos while discarding those that are deemed undesirable.”

“Parents, doctors, and society become the evaluators of the future worth and quality of the lives of existing embryos, and the arbitrators of life or death for these embryonic human beings.”

Contact:
The Assisted Human Reproduction Implementation Office
Health Canada, AL 7002A
Ottawa, Ontario K1A 0K9
Fax: (819) 934-1828
Email: ahr-pa@hc-sc.gc.ca

Glad you asked.
For the past 150 years, the intent of futurists/socialists and those who favor the central authority of government in society has been to remove the authority of cultural tradition and religion from the public sector.
Arguments for the privacy of religion and for multiculturism have been thinly veiled campaigns to relegate knowledge and experience from the past to a curio shop of cultural oddities.
This campaign (designed by Marx, Freud, Dewey, Spinoza, Darwin, Emerson and many others) has designed social structures oriented to a utopian future by breaking radically with the past. The viewpoint of each of these philosophers has been based in a belief that the evolution of society and the individual are hopelessly restricted by the influence of all that has gone before, especially by religion.
The central theme of cultural tradition and its concomitant, religion, is morality based on natural law. Our Constitution is the quintessential example of this. Futurists believe fervently in the absolute authority of government over all aspects of personal and social behavior. It is vital, therefor, for them to overcome the founding principles of the Constitution.
In an attempt to do this the Founders are denegrated as white, racists, slaveholders, capitalists and bigots to a man. Their appeals to the Creator and Natural Law are viewed by futurists as attempts to confine society to a narrow, provincial and wholly backward political system. The reliance of the Constitution and its historical antecedents on morality are major stumbling blocks to the New World so fervently sought by socialists.
This is precisely why it is critical for those who wish government to dominate society to root out all vestiges of religion and morality. They, then, can have a free hand to redisign man and society in their own image. This is the precise struggle in which we are engaged. It is a war for the continued existence of mankind centered on God. We are far along this path with no clear way back.
The World Council of Churches and all of the major denominations have bought into this campaign. They, too, view religion as deeply personal and private. Politics and society, in their view, can not be influenced by any but the most vague religious sentiments.
We will, consistent with this view, see H. Clinton portray herself as a Methodist but not as a Christian. She will stress the absolute privacy of her religious experience and will insist that it is inappropriate to apply her religious beliefs to her politics. Note, especially, that she uses the words "society" and "government" interchangably. This is a vital key to ferreting out the Marxists among us.

This is worth reading --- and circulating.

My friend in Holland, Nancy Forest-Flier, just yesterday sent me this eloquent article--- written by a severely disabled person who is opposed to eugenic abortion --- that appeared in Trouw, a major Dutch newspaper. Nancy did the translation. From: Forestflier@cs.com
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Disabled people are so much more than their disabilities

There's some sort of taboo on deciding to go ahead with the birth of a child that you know has a disability or sickness, and to simply admit that you're happy with the child just as he is. Recent research on the consequences of abortion performed on disabled or sick children, conducted by Dutch midwife Marijke Korenromp, confirmed that for me once again, although she didn't say so in so many words.

At least one in five women suffer from traumas if they decide to abort because their future child is said to have some kind of abnormality. Yet only one to three percent of those asked say they regret their decision. I can imagine how difficult it must be to admit you're "sorry" for not allowing your child to be born. On the basis of information provided by experts, these people believed that they had done their best for their child by sparing him a life with a disability or sickness. Added to this is the fact that society in general regards the selective abortion of a fetus with an abnormality as appropriate and self-evident. Knowing that, just try admitting you're sorry. And if you do, where do you go from there?

Unfortunately, Korenromp's research never asks whether we're on the right path with these selective abortions or whether it wouldn't be better to just let the disabled and sick children be born. It seems to me that these are questions we desperately need to ask. The selective abortion of a fetus with a disability or sickness is a result of developments in medical technology that took place within the seclusion of laboratories, where scientists strive work to create the perfect human being free of any deficiencies. On that basis, people have apparently swallowed the idea that disabilities are simply "not done." And as a result, in our little country at least 550 pregnancies are terminated each year only because the child is believed to have some kind of defect.

I know from experience what it's like to have a serious disability. I've been seriously spastic since birth. That means I can't walk and can't use my hands, and I have a speech defect. It's not fun. Sometimes I feel like a prisoner in my own body. I anxiously follow the discussions on prenatal diagnostics and the selective abortion of fetuses with disabilities or sicknesses. I've always thought there was something wrong with this line of reasoning -- that people involved in these matters either don't get what it's all about or aren't being honest. If you could prevent severe disabilities by means of selective abortion it would be a fantastic discovery. But those aren't the facts. With selective abortion you prevent the life of a whole human being, of which the disability is only a small part.

Granted, I'd be better off without my disability. But I'm much more than my disability alone, and there are so many things that make life worthwhile. I dread to think that I would have missed it all, just because of my disability. I'm speaking for myself alone, but there are tons of people with disabilities who wouldn't want to give up their lives. There are even people who have become disabled because of failed suicide attempts, after which they can hardly think about suicide any more. Believe me, a disability is really no reason to not want to live, even though you occasionally get royally fed up about all the things you can't do because of your disability.

I think this is just as true for parents (or future parents) who have a child with a disability. Of course you don't wish a disability on your own child, with all the limitations that entails. But that cannot mean you don't want the child at all, just for that reason. This is evident from the fact that parents have more trouble working through an abortion if they've held their child in their arms. If you hold a child in your arms, it's not a disability or sickness you're holding but a complete human being who undoubtedly would have had a great deal to offer. That's what we're talking about here.

If we were honest with ourselves, we'd stop acting as if selective abortion were a wonderful way to prevent disabilities and sicknesses. We'd recognize that selective abortion destroys whole human lives. And if we were really honest with ourselves, we'd ask ourselves and each other whether we allow selective abortion because a disability or sickness is too horrible to live with, or because we think people with a disability or chronic illness are too expensive and don't have a place in the modern and dynamic society we have in mind. I'd like to see such a discussion arise from a study like Marijke Korenromp's.

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Yvette den Brok works as a publicist

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