njlauren
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Joined: 10/1/2011
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This story raises all kinds of ethical questions, and they are not easy to answer, from any angle. Anti abortion people will tell you adamantly that anything that is living and born from a mother is a child, and cannot be aborted and shouldn't be allowed to, yet they aren't the ones who have to live with that, the parents do. A child who tests out for certain genetic diseases that lead to short, painful, miserable lives en utero who is allowed to go to term is going to face a lot. A child with the extra gene that causes Down's syndrome or other disabilities is going to face many challenges and it going to be hard on the family...and so forth.The problem with the focus on 'unborn children' and so forth is that it leaves out the family involved, it focuses on one issue and ignores the other. Saying you will pray for someone with a severely disable child is to duck the issue.
The answer with that is it has to be up to the parents, it is their lives, they have to decide what they wish to do. I remember a story, in the early 1970's just before Roe, NY State legalized abortion. The vote was a close one, and one of the deciding votes was this quiet Italian guy from the Bronx area family lived in. He took all kinds of shit, Ma Church thundered about the vote and his decision, he was vilified by the church hierarchy, threatened with being denied communion, some talk of trying to ex communicate him, it was vicious.
Someone asked him why he voted that way, and he said that he really agonized over it but that in the end he had to leave it to the parents. He said the reason was his daughter had a severely disabled child, that required 24/7 care, and as a result the family split up,husband walked way. He said his daughter would never, ever get an abortion, but that seeing her struggles, he realized he couldn't tell others faced with this they had to keep going with the pregnancy, any more than someone could tell his daughter to abort it.....the fatheads in the church, with their rigidity, never seem to fathom that all moral decisions have costs and that sometimes there are the lesser of two evils (like, for example, not fighting condom programs that help prevent HIV transmission).
With something like this story, it also shows why it needs to be personal. The people in the story felt that this was their child and they had to let it come to term, they felt strongly enough to face the consequences of their actions, and that is their right, as it is for someone else to say they can't/won't deal with this. This isn't aborting a child because it is female or male, it isn't aborting it because it has brown eyes, it is deciding whether to abort it on the grounds do they feel it really will have a life...and this couple said yes, it will have a life. I could argue the child is alive, but isn't a person, because without the higher brain areas it doesn't have self awareness, it is like someone in a vegetative state...but that choice is up to the loved ones,has to be, churches and dumb ass Senators sitting in congress with an Xray are not the choosers (referring to Frist when he was senator,holding up an xray of Schiavo and saying "something doesn't add up here"...note, when they autopsied Terry Schiavo, she literally had no higher level brain tissue, it was gone).
And yes, there are slippery slopes here, about who decides and where. With something like this child, for example, if the long term care requires the resources of the public, who makes that call? If someone is in a vegetative state, or is severely disabled,should the state pay for this? Should we pay for the guy who smoked heavily, ate poorly and had a heart problem? Should someone who drank heavily, like Mickey Mantle or David Crosby (of CSN) be allowed to take a liver in transplant, since they 'did it to themselves?'? Should we waste medical resources, especially through medicare, to revive an 85 year old person who has had their heart stop, knowing more of the same would follow, with each incident costing a couple of hundred grand? The family who doesn't want to let go would say yes, but how about that maybe that money could save someone who has 20 years of life left and needs bypass? Not easy questions, but we make them. For example, we ban certain kinds of food additives (like trans fats might be) because of the health consequences that will come back to bite us; part of the reason for laws requiring helmets is that when riding a motorcycle without a helmet, the person is likely to have cases of severe head trauma, that are costly, that can end up being a public burden....
One of the ironies of the pro life people, getting back to this story, is many of them are also vehemently anti government, they scream we have to gut the government, people need to 'take charge' of their own lives, pay their own way, etc.....but few of them seem to think that with something like this baby, or in the case of Terry Schiavo, is that if they force those decisions via law, people can't take charge of their own life and in the end, will end up costing the government. How much do unwanted children cost in terms of money and social costs (of poverty, jails, etc?).......forcing parents to make decisions one way or the other, whether being forced to keep it or forced to abort it, are doing the same thing, they are taking it out of the hands of the parents, you can't have it both ways, either parents have the right to make decisions and 'take responsibility' for their lives or not, and you also, from either side, have to accept the consequences to you and society for those choices. The pro life person who wants abortion made illegal cannot duck the fact that it is going to cost them and society, they can't just walk away at childbirth as many of them seem want to do (in all fairness, I also know a lot of pro life people who fully support aid to children and so forth, but polls show many pro life people are also of the tea party/'kill the government' mentality).
I hope the parents take what joy they can out of the child's life and that there is meaning there for them and for the child.
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RE: Should this "child" have been aborted? - 
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