Several parents of babies and children with Down’s, and representatives of pressure groups, said publicly how much love and happiness such children bring, despite any “challenges”, and how they can, with support, live happy, independent lives.More or less disguised was a strong tone of moral disapproval of anyone who feels that the birth of a Down’s baby is a misfortune, to be avoided if possible. Hardly anyone now dares to say so. The word “eugenics” is often used by Down’s lobbyists to make the nasty suggestion that people who think it is right to abort a foetus with a Down’s diagnosis are as bad as Nazis. This is argument by abuse.
I protest out of long personal experience.
She goes on to relate that someone close to her in her family has a learning disability that's been a "handicap and sorrow" to her. I wonder how close they'll be after this person reads her cousin or whatever thinks she'd be better off never having been born!
But Matthew Archbold makes the point.
She speaks in fearful tones of lives of frustration, disappointment, dependence, serious illness and poverty which in reality is just part of being human. But more importantly, what the columnist is replacing all these sad experiences with is death. Death, in her world, plays the role of the great liberator from our human condition. In her world, death has the power to remove all the negatives which make up a life. Death and death alone has the power to make things right.That is what is meant by "culture of death," in case you were wondering.
For Christians, the sting of death was removed two millenia ago with the willful sacrifice of life of our liberator Jesus Christ. For many secularists, death itself is our liberator.
