Disability and Death: how the British mindset on abortion will manifest itself in assisted suicide

As reported by the BBC and Catholic Herald, there has been a high-profile case of misdiagnosis by doctors leading to the abortion of a healthy unborn baby in an NHS Nottingham hospital.

Ms Wesson, the expectant mother, was encouraged by doctors to terminate her pregnancy at 14 weeks – at the start of the second trimester, the term foetus is typically used to describe the life developing in the womb, though the NHS also refers to a “baby” at this stage – due to a diagnosis of Patau’s syndrome, a diagnosis that was shown to be false after the abortion.

It is a story that sadly is heard too often: a child aborted because doctors said it would be born with a disability or disease.

In the Nottingham case, a number of questions have been raised about the hospital’s safety record, its number of stillborn babies and the training of staff. However, one key question appears to have been overlooked.

What kind of a society kills people – especially the youngest and most vulnerable – because of their disabilities?

We sadly have examples from history.

The Spartans famously threw their undesirable children into ravines, or left them to die on hilltops.

The Nazis held a policy of Lebensunwertes Leben (“life unworthy of life”) which led to the mass-scale euthanasia and sterilisation of the disabled.

And today, in the “developed” and “progressive” West, most of its countries practice selective abortions based upon the potential occurrence of disability. Such abortions are, by definition, a form of eugenics.

The word “eugenics” means “good birth” – the idea that only the “good” (genetically) should be born and live.

We still, though, have not answered my question – what kind of a society kills people because of their disabilities? The answer is – a society that values Quality of Life (QoL) over Sanctity of Life (SoL).

In short, QoL argues that a person’s value comes from extrinsic factors. The list of these factors can be broad and varied, and considering who makes that value judgement also raises questions.

SoL, on the other hand, argues that a person’s value is intrinsic by virtue of their being human – normally because of the belief in a God-given soul. Therefore, SoL holds that innocent life should be protected at all costs.

In the case of the Nazis, QoL was based on government regulation. In Sparta it was based on societal norms.

Today? Well, today the reasons are more convoluted, but a range of QoL excuses are put forward for abortions including economic factors, life preferences and the idea that the lives of babies with disabilities may constitute “lives unworthy of life”.

QoL has become the prevailing social attitude; Britain is a QoL-fixated society and that is why a proposal like MP Kim Leadbeater’s assisted suicide Bill was able to sail through the round of voting at its Second Reading.

But there is more to the Wesson case than just the societal factors, and which should give us plenty of pause in regard to embracing legal assisted society at a national level – namely, our trust in doctors.

In the BBC article, there was no outcry about the abortion of disabled children. The article was concerned about mistakes by doctors in misdiagnosing the child. But misdiagnoses should not surprise us – after all, doctors are not infallible.

Whilst medical advice is helpful, and doctors serve an important role, their predictions are, ultimately, just informed guesses. We do not know whether what they say, diagnose, predict will play out as expected. There are cases, as with the Wesson tragedy, where doctors get things wrong.

So should we really kill innocent babies based on the guesses, however well informed, of doctors? A similar question needs to be asked about euthanasia and assisted suicide.

If we judge who should live and die based upon external factors, our views will keep shifting. As I have previously written, the QoL judgements in countries that have legalised euthanasia/assisted suicide have shifted – usually at quite a pace.

Euthanasia also opens the door to post-birth infanticide. Take, for example, a case where a disability has been undetected and only is discovered shortly after birth. If our judgements are solely based upon QoL, there is no reason not to allow that baby to be euthanised; at thirty-eight weeks, there is no difference between a disabled baby inside or outside the womb except sentiment – so why not?

As the QoL bioethicist Peter Singer once disturbingly wrote, in cases where diseases have only been detected post-birth, “replicability” – a rather sinister and obtuse term meaning “that can be done in exactly the same way as before” – can be deemed acceptable.

However, we don’t necessarily need to go this far down the slippery slope. Let’s consider “terminal illness” itself. In Leadbeater’s Bill, terminal illness is defined as follows:

“…the person has an inevitably progressive illness, disease or medical condition which cannot be reversed by medical treatment and the person’s death in consequence of that illness…can reasonably be expected within six months.”

Six months – even shorter than a typical pregnancy.

I, and I suspect many others, have heard cases of friends and family being told they only had “X weeks to live”, and the person has gone on to live longer.

Or the instance of a baby, if not aborted, will only live “X number of years”, but is now a fully grown adult.

How can a doctor be sure that the person really only has six months? There are many cases of people living longer than expected even with terminal illnesses.

As for “cannot be reversed by medical treatment” – to what extent? There are many cases of people making surprising or even miraculous recoveries. Or cases in which people who were terminally ill, have received innovative new treatments, and survived.

If such people take the doctor’s guess as prophecy, they may opt for an assisted suicide that they don’t “need” or for which they don’t even fulfil the required legal criteria.

So, what’s the antidote to this Culture of Death?

Catholicism. Catholicism holds sacred the value of each innocent life. In Catholicism, SoL is protected by the magisterial teachings of the Church that insists, from the moment of conception to natural death, all innocent life is to be protected.

Catholics must fight against this Culture of Death. A culture that treats unborn children as preferences, and the sick and dying as burdens.

We must continue to lobby, protest and campaign to end a Culture of Death that preys on the most vulnerable. But mostly, we must pray.

Pray to our Mother; the one who bore the Christ-child; who carried Him in her womb; who knows the struggles of motherhood; asking that Mary prays on our behalf for the victims of abortion and euthanasia.

Pray that St Michael the archangel, scourge of demons, fights on our behalf in the spiritual war against the armies of death that seek to change our laws, govern our minds and kill our most vulnerable.

And mostly, we must pray that the Christ who conquered death conquers the Culture of Death in our midst – changing our hearts to value the intrinsic worth of each human being, regardless of their quality of life.

Photo: ‘The Selection of Children in Sparta’ by Jean-Pierre Saint-Ours. (Image in the Public Domain).

The post Disability and Death: how the British mindset on abortion will manifest itself in assisted suicide first appeared on Catholic Herald.

The post Disability and Death: how the British mindset on abortion will manifest itself in assisted suicide appeared first on Catholic Herald.