Santorum is dead on accurate about this.
There are literally thousands of prenatal and congenital diseases that are tested for.
Only a handful actually have any treatments.
So, if we can't treat these diseases, why are we doing prenatal testing?
Well, as the Wikipedia article on prenatal testing points out: "The option to continue or abort a pregnancy is the primary choice after most prenatal testing. Rarely, fetal intervention corrective procedures are possible."
Which is exactly what Santorum said.
So, the question is this: is most prenatal testing really just a cover for doing eugenics?
The answer, of course, is "yes".
Now, that raises a separate set of questions:
For one, if we are doing eugenics on the young, then what happens when, as Mark Steyn points out,
"Timmy Geithner referred only to "demographic challenges" – an oblique allusion to the fact that the U.S. economy is about to be terminally clobbered by $100 trillion of entitlement obligations it can never meet. And, as Chart 5-1 on page 58 of the official Obama budget "Analytical Perspectives" makes plain, your feckless, decadent rulers have no plans to do anything about it."That is, how far off can eugenics on the Baby Boomers be?
Which itself raises another question:
If we are upset about insurance companies doing chromosomal analysis on us and charging premiums based on those analyses, why do we let people do chromosomal analysis on our children and choose to allow them to live or die based on those analyses?
Are we not hypocrites, when we do to our own children what we would never allow government to do to us?
And, how long can we expect government - which is composed by us - to refrain from doing to us what we already do to ourselves?
4 comments:
This is exactly why i did not have prenatal testing done.
And nowadays, do you know the immense pressure young women get FROM THEIR OB's (unless they are APLOG OB's of course) to terminate? They convince them it is "the most humane thing for the 'fetus'" and then many of these women actually believe they then have " a little angel in heaven" - how sad is that? I actually, truly, know this goes on all the time. It is so sad. Instead of giving your child a few moments (to a few days) of knowing your voice and being held and feeling love, then you going through the normal grieving process, you are brainwashed into thinking that murdering your child via sucking their brains out and then slicing them up is the "humane" thing to do. And let's not mention that for the woman's body it is much healthier to go through the normal hormonal flow of birth, rather than the abrupt and non-natural hormone disruption from a deliberate termination. Sick huh? Evil, evil people that convince (mainly uneducated) women that is the best thing to do. Shame on them.
You are exactly right. The "counselors" use phrases like, "Your best option is termination." "this is going to end really sadly." "you need to decide right now so we can get the procedure scheduled. Here is the consent form. We can get a time that works for you."
Those things were all said to a friend of min in one 15 minute session right being told her baby had a chromosomal anomaly.
Even in secular settings, medical and nursing professionals have created Perinatal Hospice programs where even in situations of grave fetal diagnosis, parents can be supported to the natural conclusion of the pregnancy and the baby can tell their own story rather than being defined by what anyone else thinks of them.
Even if the baby's disease is life limiting, the natural birth and death are better for moms and babies than terminations for physical and emotional & spiritual reasons.
When presenting these ideas to leadership, its important to not come across as lunatic fringe... I presented our model as an alternative and you cant have a choice if there is only one option. Our genetic counselor presents carrying a baby with a disease as a reasonable option.
Print media is teeming with articles about this topic in both Christian and secular realms.
I work in a specialized free clinic that does pg testing, ultra sounds and prenatal care so I see a lot of women, some of whom choose abortion despite our best efforts to present positive alternatives. But I also have a personal example involving my son and daughter-in-law. Doctors thought something serious was wrong with the fetus early on. There were weekly ultra sounds and doctors speculated the baby might have Down syndrome or hydrocephalis. They insisted on testing the baby during the mid trimester so everyone could "prepare" for what was to come. My son and his wife said they would never terminate the pregnancy no matter what. The test seemed to indicate water on the brain and they planned to operate as soon as the baby was born. My granddaughter was born with neither conditions and did not need an operation. She was, however, born without a part of her brain called the corpus collasum. It started forming but stopped at some point during the pregnancy. She is now approaching her 2nd birthday and has some developmental delays but is a joy to all of us. With early intervention she learned how to eat from a spoon, crawl, walk and develop language. She is a miracle and how said it would have been if her parents opted for terminating the pregnancy when they found out she would be a special needs baby. We love her so very much and her tenacity is inspiring.
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