Viable People
From LifeSite:
Disabled Children Better Off Aborted: House of Lords Peeress
By Hilary White
LONDON, February 1, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Seriously disabled children should be considered non-persons and would be better off having been aborted, according to a Peer speaking in the House of Lords Tuesday. Attempting to couch her assertion in terms of children's "rights", Molly Baroness Meacher told the Lords that children born with severe disabilities are "not viable people".
The comments came as the Lords debated an amendment to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, put forward by Lady Swinton, Baroness Masham of Ilton, that would have protected unborn disabled children from abortion after the 24 week gestational time limit. The amendment was defeated by 89 votes to 22.
Under Britain's abortion law, children judged to have some form of disability, including such comparatively minor disabilities as club foot or cleft palate, can be aborted up to the time of natural birth.
The article continues:
Others in the Lords, however, do not share Baroness Meacher's extreme form of eugenic thinking. Robert Shirley, Lord Ferrers, said he was "apprehensive" about abortion at early stages "because you are destroying some form of life", and "deeply apprehensive" about abortion in later stages, since it is "difficult to tell...when [the child] becomes a human being with a soul."
Lord Ferrers said he hoped the amendment would pass, "because I do not think it right that human beings should decide at one moment that this child, who is a human being, should not be born."
Baroness Tonge, a leading supporter of the Voluntary Euthanasia Society, said that the children referred to were not "disabled human beings" but "grossly abnormal human beings". Citing the "grotesque appearance" of children with anencephaly, Tonge said, "many of those whom I have seen bear little resemblance to human beings."
But Baroness Williams of Crosby said the permission to kill the disabled before birth is at odds with the nation's efforts to help disabled people throughout their lives. "We have a society where once people are born we increasingly go to extraordinary lengths to look after them if they are disabled."
"One of the things that really frightens me is that, if we pick out the potentially disabled at the age of 25 or 26 weeks, we will sooner or later develop an attitude towards the severely disabled who have been disabled since birth," she said.
Contact:
Molly Baroness Meacher
The House of Lords,
London, SW1A 0PW
U.K.
"To be ignorant and simple now- not to be able to meet the enemies on their own ground- would be to throw down our weapons, and to betray our uneducated brethren who have, under God, no defense but us against the intellectual attacks of the heathen. Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered." -C.S. Lewis
