Simple Birth Defect - Enough To Abort Child

THE RANT.US ^ | MARCH 21, 2005 | Warner Todd Huston

[CHARLITE]

One of the philosophical points used by anti-abortion activists to explain their stance, one oft times claimed by critics to be purely hyperbolic and wildly outside the logic of debate, is the slippery slope argument of "Where will it all end up?" Those against abortion wonder aloud just where society and/or government will draw the line of when an abortion is legitimate and when it is not and how often that line will be redrawn past the next extreme, and then the next. Critics say that their worries are silly, unfounded or are examples of religious demagoguery.

Anti-abortion advocates firmly believe that should abortion become a thing of little consequence, the heart of society will harden to humanity itself. They insist that if hard hearts reduce all fetuses to a status of non-existence it cannot help but foster an increased disregard for humanity. They also worry that abortion will be expanded as a palliative to help people escape from under responsibility for their own sexual mores, or lack there of.

Most ominously, anti-abortion believers feel that government is just one step away, a step that can be made at any time, from being given the power to decide when people will live and when they will die. They agonize over the criteria for making such decisions. Just when will it be OK to kill a baby, anyway, they wonder? Birth defect? Brain damage? Parental inconvenience? Hair or skin color? How can we legitimately draw up such criteria that will not be open to the whim of passing societal norms?

Again, critics say these worries are just hogwash and so much abortion rally boilerplate. But are the critics right? Will government and society always have enough human compassion to make sure that the kinds of abortions whose justification rests on simple convenience or other such murky criteria remain forbidden?

It would seem that a case in Britain has answered our question in a recent report in the Guardian newspaper.

Joanna Jepson, 28, who works at St Michael's Church, Chester, England was born with a congenital jaw defect and her brother has Down's syndrome. She was not able to have her defect corrected until she was a teenager. While training to be a vicar she learned that two doctors aborted a fetus seemingly for the sole reason that the child would be born with a cleft palate.

Ms. Jepson was so alarmed that a correctable defect was the reason for the death of a baby at the hands of doctors that she brought the case up before the Crown Prosecution Service responsible for watching over medical malpractice in England. Unfortunately, they declined to prosecute.

With typical English aplomb, the Cleft Lip and Palate Association felt obliged to accept the CPS verdict. Commenting on the case, chief executive, Gareth Davis, said "Our concern was that if it was beyond all doubt that all it was a cleft lip and palate, then we could not understand why a decision to terminate had been taken."

I cannot understand it either. It seems to me that the abortion critics have seen their worst fears come true in this case. Some parents who did not want to have the bother of a special needs child, a child with a wholly correctable condition mind you, found some "doctors" willing to kill their baby before such an inconvenience befell them. Worse, it seems that the British government is completely unconcerned with the situation.

What could be worse when both parent and government find themselves unconcerned over the destruction of an innocent life? Is this not what the anti-abortion advocates claim must be the outcome of continued abortion? Isn't this what they worry will befall a society that places no intrinsic worth on the life of a fetus?

Hard hearts in England have already proven the anti-abortion believers correct. Will American hearts also harden so? This is the question that assaults our senses, a new demonstration of an American “culture of death”, as we live through the Terri Schiavo case in Florida today.

We have right here in the US the first warning sign that England has already turned their backs upon and decided to ignore. Let we in the United States, the land of Life, liberty and freedom, always hold life dear. Let us SAVE Terri’s life.

[Mobile Vulgus]

Here is where elitest lefties say, "The slippery slope argument is not a legitimate argument". Just because this one case happened doesn't mean it will become the norm, they'll say.

But what they won't admit is that humanity IS a slippery slope argument. Man will push everything to its most absurd limit until a backlash casts it the other way.