Rev. Koole is pastor of Grandville Protestant Reformed Church in Grandville, Michigan.
The slippery slope. We have all heard of it. Remove the legal restraint on something forbidden, and be prepared to be troubled by greater evils down the road. We have seen it happen time and again. In ecclesiastical affairs for instance. “Just women deacons. That is all we are seeking to justify on scriptural grounds. Not elders and ministers. Your fear is completely groundless and misplaced.” But once granted…. You know the rest. In a couple of years’ time these same men were saying, “But simple logic and consistency demand that all the offices be opened to women. Any dummy should be able to see that! How simple you ‘conservatives’ are.” The Devil is content to plot his strategy square by square, piece by piece, and to use smooth-sounding men (whose ‘reassuring words’ can be no more trusted than the father of the lie himself) to accomplish his ends, gaining one concession at a time until he dominates the board. And once his pieces are in place, expect no quarter. He intends to take his diabolical gains to their logical ends. So in the abortion issue.
The opponents of abortion have always pointed out that public policy that legalizes the murder of the unborn can only arise out of a debased evaluation of human life and must inevitably lead to a greater devaluing of human life until not one person whose contribution to ‘civilized society’ is questionable is safe from being “terminated.” The advocates of abortion have always said “Nonsense. You see boogey-men where none exist.” Well, guess what. The “pessimists” were right again, as pointed out in an article in the December 5, 2002 issue of Boundless, entitled “Targeting the Disabled,” by Roberto Rivera y Carlo. Writes y Carlo:
…The devaluing of human life continues unimpeded, as attendees at a recent conference at the University of Rhode Island learned. At the 10th “Genetic Technology & Public Policy in the New Millennium” symposium, Daniel W. Brock, a bioethicist at the National Institutes of Health, gave a presentation entitled “Genetic testing and selection: A Response to the Disability Move-ment’s Critique.”
In his presentation, Brock argued that prenatal testing to prevent the birth of severely disabled children, such as the blind or those with “severe mental retardation,” was in the public interest. Caring for people with these sorts of disabilities consumes precious and often limited resources: money, time, and emotional energy. Brock told his audience that “it’s a mistake to think that the social and economic costs are not a legitimate concern in this context.”
What is more, he said, these expenditures do not necessarily translate into a meaningful improvement in the quality of life of the severely disabled. Even with what Brock calls “environmental” changes, such as handicapped access to buildings and learning new skills, such as American Sign Language or Braille, the disabled live with “real disadvantages.”
It doesn’t matter that the disabled don’t seem to mind. “Our notion of how good a person’s life is [isn’t] fully determined by their own subjective self-assessment,” Brock told his audience. Besides, “preventing a severe disability is not for the sake of the child who will have it. Rather, it is for the sake of less suffering and loss of opportunity in the world.”
Did you catch those last couple of sentences, and for whose sake, according to Brock, preventing severe disability is not? Not the disabled. Mention is made of “less suffering and loss of opportunity in the world.” Whose suffering? Whose loss of opportunity? Why, you simpleton, ours! We, the healthy ones, should be spared the ‘suffering’ and loss of opportunity that diseased and disabled persons bring upon us by their intrusion into the opportunities and resources available to us! Unbelievable. The sheer unadulterated selfishness of it all. In Brock’s ‘brave new-world’ the well-fed and well-bred are what life is to be all about.
Do you know what this man (who was listened to with honor!) has just implied? This! The great and decisive consideration of the medical profession ultimately is not the happiness and well-being of the patient (your crippled child for instance), but the “right to happiness” (fullness of “opportunity”) of society at large. Will society benefit (financially, emotionally) from the continued presence of this or that disabled person? If society (read—the bureaucrats appointed to make such judgments) thinks not, then the family of said-individual owes it to society to make sure such a child never sees the light of day. This is the inalienable right of the well-fed and the well-bred!
y Carlo points out that this perspective has a long pedigree in American life. He writes:
Compare Brock’s appeal to the prospect of ‘less suffering and loss of opportunity’ to the following [quote]:
“It would be strange if [the public welfare] could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices … in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind…. Three generations of imbecilities is enough.”
You’re probably thinking that I’m quoting some Nazi-era document but I’m not. It’s from Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes majority decision in Buck v. Bell (1927), which upheld a Virginia law that mandated sterilization of what then were called the “feebleminded.”
For the better part of a century, a segment of American elite opinion has practiced and advocated various forms of what is euphemistically called “birth control” to promote its vision of a better society…. Like Holmes, they made lofty-sounding appeals to the ‘public welfare’ and inveighed against the costs associated with allowing certain births to take place. (One Michigan legislator went so far as to introduce a bill calling for the electrocution of severely retarded infants, claiming that electrocution was a humane way of putting these children out of their suffering.)…
As a result [of consistent Supreme Court decisions over the past 30 years to legalize abortion procedures of every stripe and hew], the campaign to minimize suffering and maximize opportunity is free to proceed in an unfettered manner. And proceed it has, long before Brock gave his controversial remarks in Cranston. You see, the dirty little not-so-secret is that Americans are already practicing what Brock preaches. They are working to eliminate an entire class of disabled people: those with Down Syndrome.
These have been, as Tucker Carlson put it in the Weekly Standard, “targeted for elimination.” According to several studies, 90 percent of the women who learned, through amniocenteses and chromosome analysis, that they were carrying a child with Down Syndrome subsequently had an abortion. Combine this with the way that doctors, for insurance, regulatory and legal reasons, strongly encourage their patients to undergo testing, and a pattern emerges: an unofficial, but nonetheless effective, effort to reduce the number of people with Down Syndrome.
Why? For many of the same reasons Brock cites: raising a child with Down Syndrome is expensive and, as Nachum Sicherman of Columbia University put it, most of the cost is “not going to be paid by parents.” And, of course, there are the non-monetary costs, such as “the number of women who would have to quit their careers to care for these babies,” mentioned by an embryologist in a New York Times article.
As y Carlo concludes, what just a few years ago was considered to be unthinkable, society now embraces, or at least is willing to overlook. The direction in which our “Christian, civilized society” isheading is truly frightening. Life means next to nothing at all, especially that life which intrudes into society’s own comfort and ease. The “undesirables” must go. How long will it be before Christians, that is, those who prick self-centered, greedy, murderous society’s conscience in matters like these, and who will not terminate their children’s lives on the altar of “society’s benefit,” are also labeled as “undesirable”? One can almost feel the breath of the Dragon on one’s neck.
Whistleblower Magazine, in its January 2003 issue, marking the thirtieth anniversary of the infamous “Roe v. Wade” decision, carries an astonishing article in which it interviews one of the cofounders of the pro-abortion movement, Dr. Bernard Nathanson. Nathanson was one of the principal architects and strategists of the abortion movement in the United States in the late ’60s and early ’70s. After years of personal involvement as both advocate and an abortionist, Nathanson has had, if not a change of heart, at least a change of conscience, finding it difficult to live with himself after all these years. He lays bare the sheer deceit that has permeated the pro-abortion movement from its very inception. He tells an astonishing, shocking story (part of which follows).
“In 1968 I met Lawrence Lader,” says Nathanson. “Lader had just finished a book called ‘Abortion,’ and in it had made the audacious demand that abortion should be legalized through-out the country. I had just finished a residency in obstetrics and gynecology and was impressed with the number of women who were coming into our clinics, wards and hospitals suffering from illegal, and infected, botched abortions.
“Lader and I were perfect for each other. We sat down and plotted out the organization now known as NARAL (National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League—KK). With Betty Friedan, we set up this organization and began working on the strategy.
“We persuaded the media that the cause of permissive abortion was a liberal, enlightened, sophisticated one,” recalls the movement’s co-founder. “Knowing that if a true poll were taken, we would be soundly defeated, we simply fabricated the results of fictional polls. We announced to the media that we had taken polls and that 60 percent of Americans were in favor of permissive abortion. This is the tactic of the self-fulfilling lie. Few people care to be in the minority. We aroused enough sympathy to sell our program of permissive abortion by fabricating the number of illegal abortions done annually in the U.S. The actual figure was approaching 100,000, but the figure we gave to the media repeatedly was 1,000,000.
“Repeating the big lie often enough convinces the public (sic!—KK). The number of women dying from illegal abortions was around 200-250 annually. The figure we constantly fed to the media was 10,000. These false figures took root in the consciousness of America, convincing many that we needed to crack the abortion law.
“Another myth we fed the public through the media was that legalizing abortion would only mean that the abortions taking place illegally would then be done legally. In fact, of course, abortion is now being used as a primary method of birth control in the U.S. and the annual number of abortions has increased by 1,500 percent since legalization.”
What was the result of NARAL’s brilliant deceitful marketing campaign, bolstered by thoroughly fraudulent research?
In New York, the law outlawing abortion had been on the books for 140 years. “In two years of work, we at NARAL struck that law down,” says Nathanson.
New York immediately became the abortion capital for the eastern half of the United States.
“We were inundated with applicants for abortion,” says Nathanson. “To that end, I set up a clinic, the Center for Reproductive and Sexual Health (CRASH), which operated in the east side of Manhattan. It had 10 operating rooms, 35 doctors, 85 nurses. It operated seven days a week, from 8 AM to midnight. We did 120 abortions every day in that clinic. At the end of the two years that I was the director, we had done 60,000 abortions. I myself, with my own hands, have done 5,000 abortions. I have supervised another 10,000 that residents have done under my direction. So I [am responsible for] 75,000 abortions in my life. Those are pretty good credentials to speak on the subject of abortions.”
But something happened to Nathanson—something profound. Just as it happened to countless other abortionists, abortion-clinic owners and staffers. Just as it happened to Norma McCorvey—the real name for “Jane Roe,” the plaintiff in the Supreme Count’s 1973 Roe v. Wade abortion decision.
These pioneers of the abortion-rights movement have all arrived at the same conclusion—that abortion is the unjust killing of a human baby—and have come over to the other side of the raging abortion war.
The outrageous deceitfulness behind the whole abortion movement is self-evident, of course. Lies from beginning to end, especially the end, namely, the participants assuring themselves that this is not a human being, this is not murder. The real scandal is that, despite all this evidence, nothing will change. When it comes to justifying evil, man is given to staggering self-deception, as the Master of the Lie well knows. The ‘harvest of shame’ will continue unabated in this country. Our society’s conscience has become all but dead.
