Here's part 2 of my article on The Doctor's Dilemma. When writing on contentious subjects you can't please everyone. Letters arrive in response. Some flatter you and others insult you. The best ones challenge you to think more deeply. My recent article about British doctors wondering if it was right to administer anesthetic before aborting a baby (the fetus feels great pain during the procedure) produced such a response.
One heart-written letter challenged me to reevaluate my position. A man of obvious compassion and a confessed political "pro choicer" pointed me away from the down-at-the-heel phrases on women's rights. He was lovingly concerned about Children's rights. He listed reasons why an extra child is not desirable for its own sake. In my decade of Salvation Army service I could add many other reasons too. For example: what if there are already too many mouths to feed? How about children born into slums? Think of the disadvantages to kids born in wartime. Now add the horrors of child abuse. Then there's children conceived in rape. Some even add physical deformity.
I contemplated his words for a month. He convinced me to take a new approach. We should be looking at child's rights here.
Consider the sentiments in the American Constitution that all people are endowed by their Creator with the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Let's keep working to see that no child is denied these rights. Remove the selfishness from the abortion debate. Return to the rights of the innocents.
Now would be a good time for you to decide an important issue: At what age does the Creator endow a child with these rights?
A Princeton professor places it some time after the baby arrives home and begins to be loved by the family. Does he honestly want us to believe that if the loving doesn't happen the child is rightless? Please don't start proposing the killing of a month old baby! Another thing, professor, I don't think you want orphans to be regarded as sub-human just because there's no parental love in their lives.
Returning to sanity here let's suggest awarding human rights at 9 months. If we can agree that the newly born child is then endowed nobody can kill them and be guiltless. Mind you there's a problem with our choice of 9 months. Can prematurely born babies be euthenised in their incubators?
So move the age of getting human rights back to the earliest that a baby can survive outside the womb. Surely that's a safe bet. I'm feeling better about it - but I remind you then that the medical procedure called Partial-Birth Abortion would be, as a result of our reasoning, an act of murder. It should carry the commensurate penalty.
Backing away from the emotive speech there's more to consider. Medical science is reducing the age at which premature babies can survive. Does that mean you are willing to grant human rights at an earlier age too? It might reach a point when it's at the moment of the start of heart & brain activity. Those after all are the signs that doctors use to determine the death of a patient.
Reader I don't think we have the power to grant human rights to anyone. The words in the US. constitution must be taken literally. God gives these rights and they are given at the moment He creates the person.
I understand the pressures of poverty on children. These are heart-rending problems. We cannot be at ease while even one child remains imprisoned in a ghetto. However childhood deprivation is a quandary to which killing unborn babies is the wrong answer. One selfishness doesn't remove a second or third one.