A new bill in Indiana, House Enrolled Act 1337, bans abortions that are being sought out solely because of the baby’s gender, race, or a possible disability such as Down Syndrome. This has resulted in a lawsuit by Planned Parenthood, but the reality is that the bill protects the lives of unborn babies.
The bill is aimed at protecting disabled children like those born with Down Syndrome. As of 2009, ABC News reports that a shocking 92% of women who are given a “prenatal diagnosis of Down Syndrome” abort their babies. As a result, the population of people with Down Syndrome in the U.S. has dropped considerably; there has been a 30% drop in the population of people with Down Syndrome since 2015.
On their website, Planned Parenthood called the law “extreme” with “sweeping new restrictions” that “threatens access to safe, legal abortion for women across the state.” I don’t understand how keeping people from murdering disabled babies is “extreme.” If you don’t want to or cannot deal with the responsibility of raising a disabled child, give him or her up for adoption. There are many people who want disabled babies.
The sad truth is, we are doing exactly what Hitler did in the concentration camps. The only difference is that we can tell that a baby will be disabled before she is born, so we kill her before she ever breathes fresh air and claim that she was never alive to begin with.
I’m not joking and I’m not over exaggerating when I say this: Hitler would agree with our new methods of committing genocide against the disabled community. If these methods had existed during World War II, he might have used them. He might screen for disabilities in the womb and then do just what we do: use forceps to rip the disabled, undesirable babies to pieces in the womb. He might pull them out bloody piece by bloody piece. When you think about it, it’s the perfect plan. Kill them all before they can say a word to speak up for themselves.
People with Down Syndrome are not helpless. Argentina recently gained its first teacher with Down Syndrome, and many parents report that it is a joy to raise such happy babies. They have different difficulties than “normal” children, to be sure, but no one has a right to say that a life with Down Syndrome–or with any disability, for that matter–is worse than no life at all.
Murdering another human being for being imperfect is never a basic human right. If I had been born in ancient Sparta, I would have been abandoned to die at first glance because of my crooked, anchorless eyes–a result of Duane’s Syndrome. We read about traditions like that, consider the Spartans barbarians, and breathe a sigh of relief that we’ve become more civilized than that.
Now abortionists do the same thing, but they do it in clinics with drugs and sterile instruments. We call it a procedure and say abortion isn’t taking a life, not really. Murder is raised on a pedestal as a basic human right to be protected and ignore the babies’ rights to live in the womb. Society generally refuses to even call abortion what it is–murder.
The fact of the matter is this: babies are being killed solely because they are disabled. Apparently, Planned Parenthood is okay with this; how long until babies’ lives are at risk because we can prenatally diagnose autism (which seems to be on the way), ADHD, or my own disability of Duane Syndrome, which requires expensive surgeries?
How long until we decide that it’s okay to abort babies with imperfections such as this, simply because we don’t want to deal with the inconvenience? How long until we start genetically purifying our country, like Hitler wanted, simply because we cannot be bothered to put in the extra effort? The answer is scary: We’ve already started.
This bill also requires Planned Parenthood clinics to dispose of aborted babies’ bodies in a humane manner, through cremation or burial. This stems from a recent controversy in Ohio where it was discovered that three different abortion clinics had been steam cooking the babies’ bodies and dumping them in landfills across state lines in Kentucky.
The Planned Parenthood website complains that the new law “forces” them to “have fetal tissue buried or cremated” but claims that they work “with professional medical removal vendors to ensure fetal tissue is handled respectfully and safely, in accordance with state law.”
If Planned Parenthood already follows this requirement of the law, then it should be a non-issue. They should have no reason to complain or contest this part of the law. The fact that they are contesting it suggests, at the very least, that they have a reason to be concerned if someone starts checking them. People should be concerned, especially if Ohio wasn’t an isolated incident and babies’ bodies are still being thrown away like trash.
The ugly truth is that Hitler had to dehumanize his victims before anyone could justify massacring them. Abortions based on prenatal disability diagnoses present disabled people as inconvenient liabilities, just as Hitler saw them. The difference is that the modern abortion problem is more difficult to admit than Hitler’s historic genocidal attrocities.
Society carefully provides for the disabled people who make it out of the womb while quietly playing Hitler’s game: dehumanizing unborn infants, heralding their murders as their mothers’ basic human rights, and silently ridding ourselves of imperfect and unwanted babies.
As a society, we need to buck up and be honest with ourselves. We can pretend that there is no problem with killing disabled babies because we don’t have the basic human compassion and love to care for them and our convenience is more important than other people’s lives, or we can take a step back, see the blood that is being shed, and realize how horrific our current reality is. And then we must work to change it.