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