By Dave Andrusko
“Thousands of medical ethicists and bioethicists, as they are called, professionally guide the unthinkable on its passage through the debatable on its way to becoming the justifiable until it is finally established as the unexceptionable.” — “The Return of Eugenics,” by Richard John Neuhaus.
Fr. Neuhaus’s quote from the April 1988 edition of Commentary magazine may be the single most prescient, visionary explanation of how contemporary “bioethics” went off the rail (and took us with it) as you will ever read.
Fr. Neuhaus, whom I was proud to interview and call a friend, cautioned that there are “political, legal, and moral resources to resist scenarios of the worse inevitably coming to the worst,” only to observe just two paragraphs later, “All that said, we are nonetheless witnessing the return of eugenics.”
Sometimes the intersection of eugenics and abortion is so obvious that the only reason we don’t comment more often on the union is because the major media refuse to acknowledge the self-evident. Some background from our daily NRL News Today will help make my point. (I hope everyone is receiving NRL News Today. If not, please go here and you can sign up in 30 seconds.)
In their mercilessness, their lust for killing is so unbridled they can find no logical end point.
None. And eventually that will catch up with them.
Abortion through all nine months. Check.
Indifference, if not active hostility, to abortion survivors. Check.
Picking the public’s pockets to pay for abortions. Check.
Taking the life of an unborn child because she is the “wrong” sex, the “wrong” race, or “imperfect”? For PPFA and NARAL and the usual crew, check, check!!
But for the rest of us (to quote the great American film maker, Samuel Goldwyn) “Include me out.”
Let’s amplify a bit. To return to eugenics and the medicalized scythe swung by proponents of what the Nazis called Lebensunwertes Leben (“life not worthy of life”), pro-abortion Democrats are predisposed to give short-shrift to abortion survivors.
In the warped view of these heartless people why would you do anything, other than (perhaps) wrap the baby in a towel and put her in the corner somewhere, and wait for her to die? After all, these little ones weren’t supposed to have survived in the first place, right?
Better use that time “more productively”–to abort other little boys and girls, right?
And while we can understand why pro-abortion Democrats are so adamant that abortion be legal until birth, why have they so unswervingly embraced the position that newborn babies who miraculously escape the abortionist’s clutches should be abandoned?
What were/are the ticking time bombs in the infamous (and now overturned) Roe decision that would explode in passive infanticide?
It’s probably as simple as this. A dead baby was always the point.
How you got there was just details. If the kid evades the abortionist’s best efforts, what difference does it make how you accomplish the objective which is to get them dead?
Let me end with another quote, this one from Holocaust survivor Corrie ten Boom.
“Faith is like radar that sees through the fog–the reality of things seen at a distance that the human eye cannot see.”