Long Island Coalition for Life, Inc.
Oratory Contest
Pro-Life Speech on Abortion
by Clare Hinshaw
Grade 11, Kellenberg
2007
Infant Euthanasia
Since the beginning of the fight for legal abortion in the United States, abortion advocates have been using the reasoning that disabled children should be aborted due to the fact that their lives will be full of suffering along with the lives of those around them. Now abortion supporters in Europe are no longer satisfied with being able to kill children in the womb but feel the need to actively promote infant euthanasia for disabled newborns. These activists have realized that they cannot always successfully determine if a child has a disability before birth. So, in their quest to rid the world of "inferiors", they now feel it is time to implement more extreme measures with killing handicapped children after birth by way of non-resuscitation, withdrawal of treatment decisions, and active euthanasia.
Which children would euthanasia supporters recommend for death? So far they have not named which specific conditions might make a child worthy of infanticide; however, anyone with a non-curable disease, not necessarily a terminal one, is a target. Essentially, anyone short of perfect is contaminating our world and should be exterminated.
So many advances have been made in recent years to help people with disabilities that one may wonder why it would be necessary to kill them. Well that's exactly the problem. According to Britain's Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecology "active euthanasia" is necessary for the well-being of families because the child will live longer and "a very disabled child can mean a disabled family". Having a disabled brother, I can speak firsthand on a "disabled family". If disabled means loving, caring, hard-working, fighting for each other, and depending on one another no matter what, then, yeah, I guess we're disabled, and I'm proud of it. I know our family couldn't be all these wonderful things if it wasn't for my brother Raymond. He taught us what it is to love someone unconditionally no matter how hard and to care for someone who doesn't always want you to. If that's what disabled is, then I think every family should be disabled. Of course, there are countless stories of other "disabled families". Like the story of a Jewish physician in Braunau, Austria told by his son; "On one particular day, two babies had been delivered by one of his colleagues. One was a fine healthy boy with a strong cry. His parents were extremely proud and happy. The other was a little girl, but her parents were extremely sad, for she was a Down Syndrome baby. I followed them both for almost fifty years. The girl grew up, living at home, and was finally destined to be the one who nursed her mother through a very long and lingering illness after a stroke. I do not remember her name. I do, however, remember the boy's name. He died in a bunker in Berlin. His name was Adolf Hitler." There is no concrete evidence that says a disabled child will decrease a family's "quality of life", just as there is no concrete evidence that says a "normal" child will increase a family's "quality of life". God gives families handicapped children for a reason, and it is not for us to interfere.
And the handicapped people who are told that the practice of euthanasia is for their benefit don't seem to agree with it either. As Simone Aspis of the British Council of Disabled People said, "If we introduced euthanasia for certain conditions, it would tell adults with those conditions that they were worth less than other members of society." This statement is echoed by 150 spina bifida patients who were asked whether their handicaps had made life not worth living, and should they have been "allowed to die" after birth. Their unanimous answer was that they wanted to live and that they found the question ridiculous.
But that's not what really matters to abortionists. All the talk of what is best for the family, mother, child, etc., is but a mask behind which is the hideous eugenics movement of abortionists best expressed by Planned Parenthood's founder Margaret Sanger who said, "There is only one reply to a request for a higher birthrate among the intelligent, and that is to ask the government to first take the burden of the insane and feeble-minded from your back." It was Margaret Sanger's goal to rid the world of those she called "insane, feeble-minded, unfit, morons, inferior, mentally defective, and human beings who never should have been born at all." Planned Parenthood has spent the last 34 years since the infamous Roe vs. Wade decision, trying to achieve their founder's dream, and now they are closer than ever.
The Netherlands has already adopted infant euthanasia for children with disabilities even without parents' permission, and such practices are being performed illegally in the U.K., France, Italy, Spain, Germany, and Sweden, not to mention North Korea and China. As Steven Mosher of the Population Research Institute has stated, "You don't have to go to China to discover forced abortion. It exists right here in America and has for many years." And now we are looking at not only forced abortions but forced infanticide.
The doctors who perform this gruesome practice, such as Dr. Pieter Sauer who co-authored the Netherlands' recently-adopted program of infant euthanasia, argue that because so many children are euthanized illegally, infant euthanasia should be made legal. For thousands of years there have been criminals who murder, but society has never said that because these criminals disobey the law we should make murder legal. The "doctors" practicing infanticide are nothing but criminals and should be treated as such. To even contemplate murdering someone makes a person liable to be arrested, and these doctors who are giving statements to newspapers calling for the murder of our most defenseless people should not be exempt from the law.
On January 22, 1973, many Americans believed that with the hideous Roe vs. Wade decision our country had begun to descend the slippery slope. Today we see with absolute certainty that our world has slipped farther than many could have ever imagined.
[Back to Oratory index]
[Back to Main Page]